Slashdot Mirror

http://www.chami.com/html-kit/

Lots of ways to customize, many plug-ins, write your own.

I would suggest Chami's HTML-Kit. It has a fine Word 2K tag removal feature. It has saved me a few hours of staring blankly at thousands of lines of useless MS Source.

HTML Tidy has a special mode for cleaning up Word's crappy HTML export. HTML Tidy is a free command-line tool that is also embedded in a lot of popular HTML editors.

HTML Tidy:
http://tidy.sourceforge.net/
HTML Kit (great integration with HTML Tidy; it includes HTML Tidy so you can just grab HTML Kit without grabbing HTML Tidy)
http://www.chami.com/html-kit/

Countless other editors integrate with HTML Tidy as well. Have fun and good luck!

As a PHP/Perl/JavaScript/HTML developer, here are some of the things I think I do well:

• I use liberal comments in most of my projects. I always try to use /* and */ to make multiline comments that are easy to quickly add to without worrying about a lot of pretty formatting.
• I have recently started to play with PHPDoc to create self-documenting code.
• When creating any character(s) implying "open" I immediately create the "closed" character(s) too. For example, I type "if () { }" and then fill it in. As I write this, my LI tags are all already typed, I am just filling in text now.
• I use text editors with syntax highlighting, such as HTML-Kit -- no drag & drop GUIs.
• I use tools like WinMerge, Subversion (only a little, not so good at it) and ReplaceEm to maintain large codebases.

Where I fail at coding:

• I know OOP, but it isn't natural for me, so I'm still a procedural boy, even when Object-Oriented Programming might help.
• I have no idea what vectors and matrixes are.
• I'm self-taught, my schooling is as an English major. So I have absolutely no Computer Science education behind what I do. While I try to do well, my solution to a deep and complicated problem is going to be basic compared to a guy who spent years of his life learning algorithms.

I would say the gentleman behind HT Track is an unsung hero. I sent him a bug report with pseudo-code as a guess to how to fix it. The very next day, he had sent me a thank-you email and had released a new version. I also found the Mozilla team to be very responsive to my suggestions here on Slashdot (one post turned into a new Mozilla feature -- pre-fetching). And the HTML-Kit team is very responsive to bug reports and patches too. I like all three teams at the geek level. Their products satisfy an important niche in Web development, they're responsive and accept code patches (even my poorly done offerings, with cleanup of course). I feel quite happy to call them unsung heroes of the OSS movement, and this is my second shot at singing their praises (see previous "unsung heroes of open source" article).

winzip
realvnc
ad-aware
html-kit
irfanview
zonealarm
kazaalite
subspace/continuum
prime95
weatherbug
google toolbar

Mozilla has a built-in, basic WYSIWYG editor.

Have her use this for basic layout and content and then view source/experiment with the HTML using (free) HTML-Kit to get a grasp of what's going on.

If you are running Windows, there is a nice HTML editor called HTML-Kit that integrates HTML-Tidy right in. It's not WYSIWYG, it color codes your HTML and can format it a number of ways.

Since you went to XMLSpy first, I assume you're not comfortable with the emacs keybindings. In that case, try XMLWriter before XMLSpy. It's much cheaper. If that does everything you need, great. If not, I'd really suggest trying a Windows build of emacs with PSGML, Xalan, etc. If you prefer XMLSpy to emacs, that's fine, but try out the cheaper, or OSS, tools first to spare your own wallet.

Finally, if all you're really doing is a lot of web-oriented stuff like RSS, try HTML-Kit, which has XML-oriented plugins that hook into parsers and transformation engines.

• It has a great plugin interface, should be fairly easy to cook something up
• It has an FTP interface, there must be a way to write a simple CVS to FTP gateway.

This may be a little off topic, but I thought it'd be a good time to ask: Can anyone recommend a good free/Free editor for HTML? I'm not looking for a WYSIWYG editor -- just something that allows me to hand-code more easily (with syntax highlighting and the like).

My current favorite is probably Crimson Editor. Its big features include syntax highlighting (of course), a tabbed interface, and change detection (it notifies the user if someone else has changed the file on-disk).

Any others I should look into? I've heard the suggestions for jEdit, but it doesn't seem to have a tabbed interface (at least not that I could manage to activate). HTML Kit is another one that always comes up, but I don't believe it has change-detection :-/.

Slashdotting. Don't worry. It was probably just a little Slashdotting. Works fine now.

Another topic -- The U.S. government, Microsoft: Before you support the U.S. government in invading Iraq, you should know that the U.S. government has been (mostly secretly) causing violence in numerous countries. See What should be the response to violence? . (The article takes a long time to load, and is badly in need of updating.)

My research indicates that the U.S. government support for violence and Microsoft's inability to treat its customers well are related. They are both are part of a social breakdown caused by a kind of low-level mental disturbance in which people become progressively insensitive to themselves and others. See Windows XP Shows the Direction Microsoft is Going.

For testing the HTML itself:
Amazingly great software finds HTML errors, and edits HTML:

HTML Tidy (Win 32 version) finds HTML errors and corrects them automatically if possible. See the configuration options for HTML Tidy at HTML Tidy Quick Reference

HTML Tidy works best as a plug-in to HTML Kit. (The command-line software is used as the plugin.) HTML kit positions the editor at each line with an HTML error when you click on the error.

Truly awesome free software!

NoteTab, Golden Pen and HTML-Kit...

I'll just stick to Notepad personally, as far as windows is concerned. Other than that, VI forever!

HTML-Kit works like a top, and has a great plugin system. I haven't done much much c coding with it, but it does handle auto-indenting and colorization of C/C++ code on top of the popular web programing laguages (Perl, PHP, Java, *Script, and VB code).

Hey all you slashbots

translation follows

Ti's rtol Teusday at slashdot tuday. Were all hooked on phoniks because we kant spell. Why due yuo thikn we usee acronimes?

LEARN TO SPELL YOU DUMB FUCKS

CmdrTaco, chrisd, Hemos, all you dumb fucks!!!

This site has a free HTML editor with spell check. Try it out atChami.comYeah, it only runs on windows, but since you guys can't seem to use ispell or aspell I think you need to switch to something more user friendly. And quit using Mozlla

If you use Windows (I know, I know - "boo hiss!") and do web development check out HTML-Kit it's a fantastic editor. It as all sorts of plugins for javascript, perl, php etc and can use the online annotated PHP manual for context sensitive help (and probably others too). And it's Free as in Beer!

As above, but with links, done with HTML Kit, a free HTML editor:

Here are a few articles written by/about TJ Rodgers (Cypress' CEO) and/or about Cypress:

On Jesse Jackson (towards the bottom): http://www.reasonvsracism.com/essay_race_century.h tm
http://www.cypress.com/aboutus/press_release.cfm?o bjectID=00268C54-86B3-4E6C-978C016CEF39A32A

Regarding affirmative action (to a Nun, no less):
http://www.xent.com/FoRK-archive/summer96/0241.htm l

On Second Harvest Food Bank:
http://www.cypress.com/aboutus/press_release.cfm?o bjectID=F2451423-D66F-438C-BB283FC6673CACC0

Solar Power:
http://www.cypress.com/aboutus/press_release.cfm?o bjectID=A571C5CC-0870-447C-993E7DE2BC4E8A02

He also had an interesting piece in the May 20th USA Today regarding frivilous lawsuits, but I can't find a link to it anywhere.

That's what I like about Chami's HTML-Kit Our marketing people dummy up the site in word/powerpoint/publisher, I run it through the auto-indent, "strip Word 2000 tags", and "convert to XHTML" filters, and boom, I have 90% of a page redesign done, its a matter of getting positioning and colors right after that.

At least that's what I've found to be true. If I can get all the software I want in freeware versions, why pay for a shareware version? Sometimes it takes some searching to find a great freeware product, but it is always more satisfying to me to find something free and usefull rather than simply shelling out for the ubiquitous version that does the same thing (although sometimes is actually inferior). When I install a new Windows OS for someone, I always download Filzip for them, rather than Winzip with its anoying nag screen. I also try to teach people about the Gimp and they are always amazed that they can have a Photoshop equivalent for free.
Also, the great HTML-Kit, VirtualDub, Blender, and many others are great, professional apps that happen to be free.
You can even run a portal like Slashdot on freeware (using Slash or MaxWebPortal).

HTML Kit is a nice editor for win32 (though happen to prefer Crimson Editor), but keep in mind that HTML Tidy is a separate product (no affiliation with HTML Kit) that you can download on your own. And, unlike HTML Kit, HTML Tidy is available for many operating systems, including Windows, Linux, Mac, and even Atari.

Better yet, get a copy of HTML-Kit which implements HTML-Tidy.

If there is a Word2k/97 "HTML" document you need to read/mirror and you are on windows95-XP, try HTML-Kit and its "clean up windows 2k documents" filter, it is quite handy.

Codewarrior has some nice features for sure, but after the license fiasco at UK, I'll never use it.

Synopsis:
For intro to programing (CS115) the gods above decide it was time to move to an IDE, so packaged with our text(excellent book for intro C/C++ programing BTW), they bundled a copy of CodeWarrior 4 that had license keys that expired about a week after classes began. So the CS department had to scramble with Metrowerks to get new keys, but I kept chuging along with HTML-Kit, puTTY and the student webserver, with my ~home/bin mounted on my windows box. Every program was compiled with -ansi and -wall switches. I double checked on codewarrior to make sure it would compile before submitting programs, but that was about it.

Windows
Good:
Php Coder - builtin interpreter and function reference
EditPlus
Bad:
MPS PHP Editor
Indifferent:
HTML-Kit
Unix

*strike*code warrior*strike*Latte*strike*Glimmer

- this is the best notepad-style (with tabs for multiple files) Unix text editor - extensible, with adjustable background images, etc., scriptable in Python
[note the syntax highlighting file is suboptimal -

should be

Crossplatform
Emacs
Vim (PHP highlighting not very good)

But basically my personal recommendations:
syntax highlighting good, all else redundant

So choose the best editor out there; there's not much else you can do with PHP - it's not WYSIWYG suitable, and the functions are so high level, things *like* dialog editors are redundant. As for ftp, I strongly recommend that if you're on Unix, you install your system's PHP & Apache packages, and on Windows install PHP Triad, an integrated MySQL/PHP/Apache installer. This way you don't have to worry about FTP till you're finished [just a warning: always make sure your local PHP is *older* (or the same) as the one on the web server - v3, apart from having fewer functions, also has a lot of weird and undocumented bugs and misfeatures - e.g., you get errors if you call something $file (or class file); in v4 you can instantiate

class classname {
// No constructor
}

with $object=new classname();
but v3 only allows brackets when the class has a constructor.

Here's how I work:

editor w/syntax highlighting, editing files direct - so much nicer than FTP, and without the FTP problems
browser window set to PHP manual (locally, for speed)
browser set to view PHP pages (Opera is good for this purpose because of its MDI (hint: use 4 and 5 to tab between windows), which generally sucks, but is good in this case cos you don't have to open lots of windows)

From personal experience I would put ColdFusion and PHP tied for the top slot. CF is cleaner and easier for building small apps but PHP has MUCH better support and is better for medium size apps. Not to mention the easiest to learn. ASP sucks. Really there is no such thing as ASP since its really a hodgepodge of VBScript, JScript and HTML. With Microsoft's .NET it gets even worse with 16+ languages available. PHP is simple, has decent string handling and excellent online support. PHP+Apache+MySQL is a killer combo. Want an easy install? Check out PHPTriad for Windows. Chances are than any question you could come up with has been asked and answered in one os the the support groups.

Before I forget.

• PHP link
• MySQL link

Another important feature is that these techniques are server side so are independent of the browser used. You can also use PHP with Oracle 8i but most of the really cool stuff is centered around MySQL. Plus, why spend money on software if you don't have to. Spend the money save paying for support or donating to the OpenSource projects (PHP and MySQL). Yet another advantage is that the application can be developed and tested on Windows (read Configuring Windows98 For Local Dev) then uploaded to the Apache Server. A good free program with PHP syntax highlighting and tons of other goodies for developing is HTML-Kit.