Web-site Development Tools

[John R. Little]

For my own environment we use AOLpress (www.aolpress.com). 
This is a freeware cross platform WYSIWYG editing tool 
which can be set to write only standard HTML 3.2 code -- 
though I have chosen to also include Netscape HTML 
extensions.  Admittedly if one wants to insert bad 
tagging, one can use brute force. But this tool works 
pretty good, and has been praised annually in _PC Magazine_ 
in the same breath with the more expensive (e.g. 
$100/client) editors/authoring tools.  It has some quirks 
but I've yet to find a software tool that doesn't.  It's a 
memory hog especially on lower end machines and seems to 
work best in the 32-bit windows environment (though I have 
not tried the UNIX client).  The Mac version will work just 
fine.  Best of all it allows a very simple method of hand 
tagging -- integrated into the application -- which is 
quite fast.  And validation takes not time at all -- lest 
your machine is a poky ole dog.

So that's my plug for the web authoring tool that I find 
most generally useful and that can be easily integrated 
into a multi-author work environment. It handles tables, 
image maps, forms, and standard 3.2 HTML very well. More 
complex, super-jazzed pages (javascript, CSS, etc.), may 
require additional skills and tools.  My disclaimer being 
that if you have tools to take advantage of the more 
complex web authoring environment you should learn what 
your tools are doing and make some allowances for lower end 
browsers.


--John
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  John R. Little       Web Developer/Systems Librarian 
  Perkins Library * Duke University * Durham, NC       
  VOICE: (919) 660-5932    Email: john.little at duke.edu 
              http://www.duke.edu/~jrl/
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