HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
which comes with more and better writing tools than simple text editors
or the browser-based markup-language editors. You'll find, for instance,
that an outliner, spellchecker, and thesaurus will best help you craft
the document's flow and content, disregarding for the moment its look.
The latest word processors encode your documents with HTML, too, but
don't expect miracles. Except for boilerplate documents, you will prob-
ably need to nurse those automated HTML documents to full health. (Not
to mention put them on a diet when you see how long the generated
HTML is.) And it'll be a while before you'll see XHTML-specific markup
tools in the popular word processors.
Another word of caution about automated composition tools: they typ-
ically change or insert content (e.g., replacing relative hyperlinks with
full ones) and arrange your document in ways that will annoy you. An-
noying, in particular, because they rarely give you the opportunity to do
things your own way.
Become fluent in native HTML/XHTML. Be prepared to reverse some of
the things a composition tool will do to your documents. And make sure
you can wrest your document away from the tool so that you can make
it do your bidding.
1.6.1.2. Browser software
Obviously, you should view your newly composed documents and test
their functionality before you release them for use by others. For
serious authors, particularly those looking to push their documents bey-
ond the HTML/XHTML standards, we recommend that you have several
browsers, perhaps with versions running on different computers, just to
be sure one's delightful display isn't another's nightmare.
The currently popularand therefore, most importantbrowsers are Mi-
crosoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Safari (for Apple), Opera, and
Netscape Navigator, though the last is rapidly disappearing from the
Web landscape. Most versions run on the variety of popular computing
platforms, such as the various Microsoft OSes, Linux, Mac OS, and so
forth. Different browser versions often vary in the elements of HTML and
XHTML that they support. We make every effort to point out those dif-
 
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