A variety of tools are available today to help developers work in the complex world of HTML. This section examines a few of the common tools.

Link checkers

There’s not much that can frustrate visitors to your site more than running into broken links. The Web changes so quickly that anyone who’s been surfing for more than a day or two will expect to click some link and find the dreaded ‘‘404

- Web Page Not Found’’ error now and then. Dead links can happen but should be eliminated in testing. Dead links can lead to lost sales and lost customers. If people have trouble with your site, if they search for something and they can’t find it, they may badmouth your site because of the lack of information accessibility. One or two dead links here and there are acceptable to any but the most high-strung people. But no one likes clicking on a whole series of dead ends it’s an annoying waste of time for them. If you let your visitors suffer this way, they’ll remember your site for all the wrong reasons, and they won’t be coming back in a hurry or recommending it to their friends.

Link checkers are programs or online services that perform the tedious task of following every single link on every page in your entire site and reporting back to you on which ones worked and which ones didn’t. They can check them all in a few minutes even on a very large site saving you a lot of time and aggravation. The alternative is to stare at Web pages and click and click until your vision gets blurry and your mouse finger feels like it’s about to fall off. If you have lots of links to other sites, you’re particularly vulnerable because other Webmasters have no obligation to keep you informed of their actions. Even if your site has no links to the outside world, you should still check it periodically because many times, when you make changes to your site, you risk breaking a link. Simply changing an image file (remember, images are linked into pages just as much as if you said ‘‘click here to see the picture’’) can result in a broken link.

Code validators

Whether you use plain vanilla HTML or toss in CSS, XML, and all the other alphabetical wonders of the Web, there’s bound to be something somewhere in any large site that isn’t right. Code validation programs like the one at http://validator.w3.org read through your creations and check for compatibility with published standards. Most of the time, the differences that are found and reported are negligible no major Web browser has ever perfectly followed any published standard but code validators do find real problems as well. Many browsers do their best to render pages properly. There are so many different coding styles, however, that it is the most popular browsers that have been the ones that keep pages looking good almost regardless of how they were coded.

Compatibility testers

If you happen to have a dozen different versions of every kind of Web browser on your system and you’ve got plenty of time on your hands, you might want to look at every page in your site with every one of them. Really dedicated Web designers do just exactly that. But not professionals. Pros only check against Required Tier 1, and possibly Tier 2, browsers for compatibility. Tier 3/obsolete browsers are a waste of time. If you’re not in that situation, then it’s nice to be able to run your pages through a program called a compatibility tester that’s trained to look for the common trouble spots. You’ll get advice and warnings whenever the program spots things such as obsolete tags or company-specific features. It’ll also tell you which elements on your page are limited to only newer browsers. It’s up to you whether you change those features, but you should at least know about their existence.

Authoring tools

All craftspeople are only as good as the tools they use. It doesn’t matter if they’re carpenters or artists or Web site designers. A carpenter with an inaccurate measuring tape, a blunted saw, and a plane with a blade that keeps falling off will always produce lousy work. An artist whose brush is shedding and who has to work with old paint on a badly made canvas will never be able to create any masterpieces. And Web designers whose authoring programs are not suited to their individual needs won’t win any awards, either.

On the flip side of the coin, no tools, no matter how fine and wonderful, can make the person who uses them into a winner. It is only the skilled craftsperson using the best tools who has a chance to produce the best work. A poor musician will play a Stradivarius as badly as a dimestore violin. A poet without heart will write bad poetry on a computer or with a quill pen. And Web designers who don’t bring skill and artistry to the process won’t benefit from the most sophisticated of programs.

The various articles of this article cover both the skill and artistry parts. But there’s one other thing that’s needed, and you have to bring it the earnest desire to make the best Web pages you can. If you have that, we’ll supply the rest, and you can add a few more glittering strands to this wonderful place called the World Wide Web. There are four basic types of Web page authoring tools:

- Text editors

- HTML editors

- WYSIWYG editors

- Word processors

Text editors

Text editors are simple, no-frills programs that allow you to type from the standard keyboard and save a plain text file. These are the most difficult programs for beginners to work with because they offer no help. They require you to know everything there is to know about the languages you use and how their quirks can be applied to your situation. Many intermediate to expert-level Web people, however, prefer to work this way. Different text editors offer various features, including spell checking and syntax highlighting (where different kinds of items in the code show up in different colors so that they can be easily identified at a glance). GWD Text Editor, a tool designed for use by programmers. It can, however, be very useful to a Web page designer.

For Windows, the native Notepad is the best-known text editor. If you use the Linux operating system (or any other flavor of Unix), you doubtless have your own favorite vi, Emacs, gedit, or whatever is the latest rage. And if you use a Mac, you’re already familiar with SimpleText (OS 9) or TextEdit (OS X). Tables 4-1 through 4-3 provide the World Wide Web addresses of several sites where you can find a variety of high-quality text editors.

HTML editors

These are specially enhanced text editors that are designed specifically for creating Web pages. The emphasis is still on typing code, but a wide variety of features are built in to make the process a lot easier. These are the best choice for many people, as they balance the power of hands-on code work with quite a bit of automated support. Because many text editors today provide some degree of HTML support, it is sometimes hard to draw the line between a plain-text editor and an HTML editor. The programs in Tables 4-4 through 4-6 are, however, far superior to normal text editors and are specifically designed for writing the code for Web pages.

WYSIWYG programs

WYSIWYG editors fully isolate their users from having to work with code. Typically, objects that are commonly used on Web pages are represented by icons that are grouped together in different palettes floating windows that can be brought up or set aside as needed. Web pages are constructed by using your mouse to drag the objects from the palettes onto the working screen. Other floating windows enable you to customize the settings for the objects, choose and apply colors, and add special capabilities without having to learn programming. Macromedia Dreamweaver and Adobe GoLive are two popular WYSIWYG editors that both take this approach. Other approaches to WYSIWYG editing use menus and toolbars exclusively.

Despite the fact that they are simple enough so that just about anyone can use them, these kinds of programs also appeal to professional Web designers because the best WYSIWYG editors have more than one level to them. Yes, they can be used by a child who knows no programming to create a single page, but they can also be fully exploited by a skilled expert. Most of these programs, in addition to letting you work with a simple interface, also give you direct access to the code so that you can bypass the way the program works and manually override any decisions it makes. Even people who regularly use a text editor for their work will turn to a good WYSIWYG editor when a client wants a prototype Web site done ‘‘yesterday.’’

Some of these programs come in both Windows and Macintosh versions, or both Windows and Linux versions, but the URL (Web address) is not always the same. NetObjects Fusion, which used to be available in both Windows and Macintosh versions, has discontinued Mac development, at least for the time being. As of this writing, the Windows version of Freeway was not yet available, but you should check the Web site for any updates on its status. WebSphere Home Page Builder, from IBM, was formerly known as TopPage.