HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
2.1. Writing Tools
Use any text editor to create an HTML or XHTML document, as long
as it can save your work on a disk in text file format. That's because
even though web documents include elaborate text layout and pictures,
they're all just plain old text documents themselves. A fancier WYSIWYG
editor or a translator for your favorite word processor is fine, tooalthough
it may not support all the language features we discuss in this topic.
You'll probably end up touching up the source text they produce, in any
case, and don't expect layout results like what you'd get with a page-lay-
out application.
While it's not needed to compose documents, you should have at least
one version of a popular browser installed on your computer to view
your work. That's because, unless you use a special editor, the source
document you compose won't look anything like what gets displayed by
a browser, even though it's the same document. Make sure what your
readers actually see is what you intended by viewing the document your-
self with a browser. Besides, the popular ones are free over the Inter-
net. We currently recommend Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Fire-
fox, Apple Safari, Netscape Navigator, and Opera Software ASA.
Also note that you don't need a connection to the Internet or the Web to
write and view your HTML or XHTML documents. You can compose and
view your documents stored on a hard drive or floppy disk that's attached
to your computer. You can even navigate among your local documents
with the HTML/XHTML's hyperlinking capabilities without ever being con-
nected to the Internet, or any other network, for that matter. In fact,
we recommend that you work locally to develop and thoroughly test your
documents before you share them with others.
We strongly recommend, however, that you
do
get a connection to the
Internet if you are serious about composing your own documents. You
can download and view others' interesting web pages and see how they
accomplished some interesting featuregood or bad. Learning by example
is fun, too. (Reusing others' work, on the other hand, is often question-
able, if not downright illegal.) An Internet connection is essential if you
include in your work hyperlinks to other documents on the Internet.
