[WEB4LIB] Re: Choosing Web Editors

[Peter Jorgensen]

On Thu, 17 Feb 2000, Thomas Dowling wrote:

> I'll put in another vote for a good old text editor.  It keeps you
> intimately familiar with what exactly your web site is serving up, it
> gives you a maximum degree of control over markup, and you don't have to
> wait for an upgrade to add support for a given element, non-HTML files
> like stylesheets or JavaScript source files, etc.

Am I the only person using Anansi?  It's a freeware HTML editor -- you 
work directly with the code and can manually put in any tags you like, 
but it also includes buttons and assistants for easily putting in 
standard tags, constructing tables, etc.  You can also save bits of your 
own code for easy repeated access to them.  The installation file is 
small enough to fit on a floppy disk -- when I teach beginning HTML 
workshops, I give the students a disk with Anansi on it to take with them 
(though I have them use Notepad in the workshop).

I've also used Evrsoft 1st Page 2000; this is another freeware HTML code 
editor, but it also includes some ready-made Javascripts that are easy to 
customize and include.  It gives you a choice of "Easy," "Expert," or 
"Hardcore" interfaces.  It's a much larger download, about 5 MB.

Both of these have a few bugs.  Anansi's are just minor quirks that are 
easy to work around.  Evrsoft has a bug that causes the buttons to 
disappear from the "Expert" mode -- but only on certain machines.

Anansi: http://www.xs4all.nl/~hbosma/anansi/index.html
Evrsoft: http://www.evrsoft.com/1stpage/

Peter Jorgensen
Reference Department, Lincoln City Libraries
Lincoln, Nebraska
peterj at rand.lcl.lib.ne.us