Web tool vs. straight HTML

[Thomas Dowling]

> Question: Is there an advantage to working with an HTML authoring tool? 
He
> mentioned that there was, but didn't have time to explain before he left.

Has this been elevated to the status of Religious War yet?  It seems to be
closing in on classics like vi vs. emacs, token ring vs. ethernet,
Macintosh vs. the rest of the world, etc.  Along those lines, I see the
first couple of responses read like endorsements for one editor or another.

The question of *whether there are advantages to writing by hand* leads to
some specific answers.

1.  You can immediately choose to support any level of HTML or any specific
tag.  IMO, this is critical because there is no widespread, official
version of HTML, and under Netscape's and Microsoft's ministrations HTML is
evolving organically.   If you decide it's appropriate for your site to aim
for compliance with the W3C draft of HTML 3.2 ("Wilbur") or whatever's
supported in the current release of browser X, you can either edit your
source by hand or wait for a new release of your HTML editor.

2.  You don't have to abide any buggy behavior, overtagging, or simple
differences of opinion between yourself and the author of your HTML editor.
 You won't get any mystery tags that your editor chose to invent (I've
heard reports that Pagemill includes an <INDENT> tag, for example).

3.  You can check your source against any validation service you like and
which you choose to put the effort into pleasing.   You don't have to deal
with squirrelly document type declarations that might mess up a validator
before it even starts.

4.  You can edit any HTML file created by any HTML editor.  At one point,
there were at least a couple of editors that crashed if they tried to open
an otherwise valid file that didn't have their own DOCTYPE.

5.  You can find an ASCII text editor for any platform under the sun, which
means you never have to FTP files to your desktop, make a change with a
platform-specific HTML editor, FTP back, etc.

Does any of this outweigh the obvious advantages to using an HTML editor? 
Dunno, it depends on your site/needs/training/document source/etc.  But
these are real advantages to writing from scratch.


Thomas Dowling / tdowling at ohiolink.edu / http://www.ohiolink.edu/
Ohio Library and Information Network. Please do not perpetuate the GOOD
TIMES virus hoax, started in 11/4 and circulating again in 9/96.  Refer
to: http://ciac.llnl.gov/ciac/notes/Notes04c.shtml