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It can be hard or an easy decision to chose a Web Editor. There are a lot of products available in the market today. Web Editors should not be chosed on the basis of price and what the others are using. It’s pretty important to choose a Web Editor which satisfies your needs and budget. There are little useful tips in buying Web Editor which makes a great one.

Operating system and price

These are the facts which have to be kept in mind- if an Editor won’t work for your OS (operating system) or it is not affordable, then don’t download or buy it. Than the price there are a lot of other features to a good Web Page Editor or whether the Editor it runs Mac OS or other OS.

What type of a Web Editor is it?

There are 3 types of Editors available, they are:

Text Editors: these Editors let you to edit HTML tags directly and not in a visual way.
WYSIWYG Editors: these Editors let you to edit WebPages in visual manner and not the HTML directly
Combo Editors: these editors let you to edit either text or WYSIWYG depending upon your style or mood.

An Editor that offers you both will be more useful and gets more points than the one that is only text or WYSIWYG. What ever type of Editor you use it has come with HTML validator attached to it so that you can gain more points. Having an HTML validator saves you a lot of time in the long run. Text Editors should come with tag completion and colour coding.

Managing web pages:

Many Web Editors which are more powerful comes attached with Site Managers (projects). This site manager helps you to keep the files of one Website at a particular place. By doing so the Web Editor manipulates the files as sites rather than a single file. Here Web Editors manipulate the single files through FTP. Using replace and search, Web Editors help you to manage the files.

Images

Some of the Webpage Editors provides you with limited image editing in its tool like resizing and cropping. If these Web Editors can connect to other (outside) image editors, it makes more convenient to use.

Special characters, CSS and Java script

In most of the Editors these days you can write CSS styles, if the Editor is embedded with style library, CSS validator and CSS editor. With Web Editor it is easy to write CSS WebPages. This is the same case with Java script.
Web designers mostly forget about special characters. If the text is written in English, it’s easy to assume that, for an accented character you will not require to know the codes for that.

Conveniences of Web Editors

The ability of the Web Editors to connect with data base
Support for the languages like ASP, JSP, cold fusion and PHP.
Spell checkers ignoring tags will be critical.
Some of the Editors provide you with photo gallery maker

Although Java scripts are known to be an exceptional and proprietary element but still it can cause a major problem for the HTML email. The major reasons for this is that there are a wide variety of email clients, updates, browsers, service packs and security settings thereby making it difficult predicting the behavior of the java script against any given email client. It’s quite surprising that Java scripts are actually capable of disabling any kind of active scripting that would be contained in the email document. Therefore it is always advisable to always test the java script that you would be interested in including in your email.

All the email clients are actually not capable of handling the java scripts. And in fact, most of the web based systems are known to disable the script by default just for preventing any kind of malicious code from getting executed in the system. Although you can make use of Java based navigation forms but that is also possible only with the email clients which are not web based. This is because most of the java script navigation forms do not work with maximum number of web based email clients. It is a very important point to note that almost all the web based email browsers are FORMS themselves and always make use of Java script in some way or the other. Therefore, it is very important that the script is always safe so that it doesn’t really interfere with any of their products.

These days Flash has been greatly used in the emails for actually impressing the clients, news letter subscribers or for that matter the prospects. As a matter of fact email HTML browsers are just no in no way equal to their web browsers. The complexity is further increased because of the settings, versions, preferences, third party applications and the security settings. Always remember to avoid the use of flash as far as possible in your HTML email unless and until you are absolutely sure that the email client that is being used by your recipient client is actually capable of handling the Flash content. Further, you should only think of sending the Flash content only to those clients who have actually requested for it or with whom you have certain marketing relationship.

And in case you have no other option but to send the Flash content via email then there are certain important considerations to be made in order to avoid any kind of problems. Firstly one should never try controlling the Flash content by making use of active scripting. Secondly, it is very important that one should try and consider the option of sending links. It has been most commonly seen that the majority of the web based clients are actually capable of stripping the flash content. Therefore it is always better to attach or a send a link instead of actually including the content in the email itself. This way you can have the option of playing around with a lot of limitations that are imposed b y the browsers and the email clients. And last but not the least always ensure that your files should be controlled by a trigger, an onClick or any other event but should not immediately start playing. The main reason for this is to give the user or the recipient time to open to the flash content whenever ready instead of a surprise and thereby causing unnecessary problems.

Usenet is a public discussion system which was developed to facilitate communication on the World Wide Web (WWW). Users from all over the world take part in the discussions to express their views on variety of topics and issues. Conceived by the students of the Duke University Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis in 1979, the Usenet looks like the bulletin boards and web forums. However the concept of Usenet is entirely different from these two even if the ultimate objective is same, i.e. to take part in online discussions or to broadcast certain information. The main difference between the Usenet and the Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) is that like the BBS the Usenet is not based on a central server and there is no central system owner, rather it is distributed among a large conglomeration of servers which change continuously and store and forward the Usenet messages to each other. Generally these servers operate in a loosely formed variable mesh topology.

Users of the Usenet generally read and post the messages on the local server operated by their ISP, University or by their employer. These messages are then exchanged among other servers online so that the information is available globally. The messages which the users read from or post to the Usenet are known as articles, posts, discussions or more popularly as news which are organized into different categories known as newsgroups. All the discussions are threaded with the help of news reader software. In order to use the Usenet the individuals have to subscribe themselves. Once they are logged into the user network (Usenet) the news client software application keeps track of all the activities of the users, activities like which articles they have read, the replies they have made or any new discussion initiated by them.

Generally, most of the discussions in a newsgroup are replies of some on going topics, i.e. one article is the reply of the other article. The set of articles which can be traced to one single no reply article is considered as a separate thread. Modern newsreaders display the discussions in the form of threads and sub-threads. This is very useful in case the users want to identify and follow a particular discussion in a high volume newsgroup.

Whenever a user starts a new discussion or replies to a post in a newsgroup it is available only for the users of that news server initially and then the different Usenet servers talk to each other periodically as per their configuration to copy the postings among each other and make them accessible on every network.

Usenet has its own cultural importance on the internet. It has given birth to many categories and sub-cultures and has offered millions of users an opportunity to express themselves, share their views on critical topics, help each other by giving suggestions and make friends. The messages or articles in a Usenet are transmitted in the same way the e-mails are sent. The only difference between the two is that the e-mails are restricted to their recipients but the Usenet users can access any information anytime.

Since its evolution, the HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) has been revised and upgraded a number of times in order to make the World Wide Web a better place to live virtually. HTML is a derivative of SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), but its major flaw is that it is not extensible. Thus HTML is not appropriate for deployment under a network environment.

So, the World Wide Web Consortium (popularly known as W3C) decided to develop a new breed of extensible language and came up with XML, which stands for eXtensible Markup Language. Web developers use XML to dynamically describe the information stored on a web page. Though XML, the new generation web pages describes themselves which is helpful to gain good rankings in search engine listings and help the developers to write codes for custom search tools.

• XML shall be straightforwardly usable over the Internet.
• XML shall support a wide variety of applications.
• XML shall be compatible with SGML.
• It shall be easy to write programs that process XML documents.
• The number of optional features shall be kept to the absolute minimum, ideally zero.
• XML documents shall be human-legible and reasonably clear.
• The XML design should be prepared quickly.
• The design of XML shall be formal and concise.
• XML documents shall be easy to create.
• Terseness in XML markup is of minimal importance.

(Source: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/)

XML is referred as a Metalanguage which describes other languages. It is called so because XML allows the web developers to create documents which describes themselves to their reader. Though the XML tags look like the HTML ones, the main difference between the two is that the HTML documents do not tell the web browser how to display the web page. On the other hand, the XML documents are downloaded by the web browser along with a style sheet or Document Type definition (DTD) which guides the web browser on how to display the web page.

In its raw form, an XML document looks like the HTML and SGML documents, but all are functionally different. The main difference between the HTML and XML coding is that the XML tags are very rigid. For example; the HTML language has tags which have a closing and which don’t have a closing section. But in XML either all the tags must exist in pair or announce to the reader that a closing tag is not present.

For example: in HTML you can use <BR> tag without having to close it, but in XML you have to use it as <BR>…</BR> or simply as <BR/> which announces that there is no closing tag for BR.

Another prominent difference between the two languages is that the XML requires all the tag attribute values to be enclosed within quotation marks. For example:

<font color=red>……</font>, this is wrong in XML. It should be like <font color=”red”>…….</font>

HTML is used to create and design static web pages. It proved to be very useful and easy to understand and soon after its evolution it gained world wide popularity rapidly. But with the growth of internet and its related applications the internet users demanded something more in the websites. Web surfers were vigorously expecting more interactive, entertaining and exciting web content. Thus DHTML was introduced. Some people call DHTML as an advanced version of HTML, but some did not consider it a language or a new specification of HTML. Rather, they perceive DHTML as a new way of controlling the HTML commands and functions. DHTML is basically an amalgamation of four different techniques i.e. HTML, Scripting, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and Document Object Model (DOM). Using all these tools we can create more interactive and animated web pages to arrest the attention of the internet users. DHTML is used to insert special effects to a website such as mouse rollover effects, drop down lists, animations, advanced marquee effects etc. It allows you to control the HTML elements and change them.

The four techniques which are harmonically used in DHTML are:

1) HTML: DHTML uses the standard HTML code as its base.
2) Scripting: A client side scripting language such as Java Script is used to control the elements in DHTML
3) CSS: Cascading Style Sheets are also used to define and manage the style and layout of the web pages.
4) DOM: Document Object Model allows you to access any portion of a DHTML document and change its properties.

DHTML adds life to static HTML pages. The user feels that he is interacting with the website in real time. DHTML can add an effect with any event. For example when you click on an image, it background changes. In this the effect is related with the mouse click event. Similarly a lot of events such as mouse rollover, drag n drop, scroll etc. can be associated with one or more DHTML effects.

The four properties of DHTML are:

1) DHTML is used to modify and control the standard HTML tags and their attributes.
2) DHTML gives you real time interactivity with the web page. It can position different objects, images and text dynamically within the web page.
3) DHTML is also used dynamic fonts. Only Netscape Navigator supports this function.
4) Another important feature of DHTML is Data Binding. With the help of this property the web surfer can easily access databases from the websites. This feature is only supported by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

It is clear from the above discussion that DHTML has many advantages and some disadvantages too. DHTML is more complex than HTML. The DHTML editors are very costly. Apart from this some of the features of DHTML are browser specific but still DHTML is used worldwide as it has proved itself a great utility to enhance the quality and usability of web pages. Anyone can use DHTML in any form. From a small piece of creativity to large complex codes, DHTML can be used to make web sites better than ever before.