Getting Started Creating Web Pages

Got this question recently.

I’m looking for an HTML editor that fits into my price range (free of course). I don’t need to do anything fancy, just vanilla HTML to run on an Apache server ..., and maybe some PHP down the line. Can you recommend any open source or shareware software that would run on Windows?

What to do?

First, civilized folks don’t edit HTML any more. That’s so 1999.

You have a spectrum of choices if you want to try and edit HTML.

• General-purpose text editors. Good ones do HTML syntax coloring. This is the hardy, forge-through-the-forest way to go. Raw text editing. Like when we were kids. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_text_editors. In Windows world, I use Notepad++.
• HTML-specific editors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTML_editors. Note that WYSIWYG HTML Editing is more trouble than you’d believe possible. It’s always fun for the first few months, but then you try to do something that confuses the GUI interface and you wind up with an entire paragraph in italics and can’t figure out why. Or you want to move a punctuation outside a link and discover that the editor just can’t figure out where the tag is supposed to fall and puts everything inside it. Most of us do not try to use WYSIWYG HTML editors because it slowly becomes annoying once you get beyond the trivial basics.
• IDE’s. To produce HTML sensibly, you have to also write .CSS style sheets, and you often have a number of related pages. Essentially, a “project”. An IDE is usually a better choice than an editor. All the good IDE’s are free: Eclipse, NetBeans and Komodo Edit. I use ActiveState Komodo Edit heavily.

While NetBeans or Komodo Edit seems like overkill, it will (eventually) pay out as you move into developing more than static HTML pages.

Better Than HTML

Instead of creating HTML, many of us use “Lightweight Markup” which is much, much easier to cope with and simple tools to produce HTML from the markup. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_markup_language

I use reStructuredText instead of HTML. I use the DocUtils project, which has an rst2html.py tool that converts my RST into HTML for me. I also use rst2s5.py to create power-point-like presentations from my reStructuredText. If you want to see the power of RST, you can look at my personal site and my books: and. 100% RST. No manual HTML anywhere. I use Sphinx to create really complex docments like the books.

For some tasks, I use HTML templates and simple scripts to process data and create static HTML from the data. You’d be surprised how effective this is. Few things require up-to-the-second web applications. Many things can be done as nightly batch programs that emit static HTML and FTP the HTML up to the web page. No PHP.

Application Development

For web development, PHP is fine. It will – before long – create holes in your head because it’s so badly thought out. But for getting started, it’s fun. Real companies (like Google) don’t waste their time with it because of the numerous problems PHP causes.

“Problems?” you say. “What problems?”

PHP’s world view (HTML + code in a single package) is a terrible architecture. It’s horribly slow and leads to very muddled, inflexible designs. Everyone who tries to make a global change to their site's “look and feel” finds that PHP is inflexible and a regrettable platform. Even folks who simply want consistency among several different pages within their site find that the PHP world view is more headache than solution.

But it’s fun when you first build a site that works.

Frameworks

Generally, most folks find that a “framework” is absolutely essential for debugging, consistency and separating Content, Processing and Presentation. Even a simple Blog or Forum or Visitor Registration has separate Content, Processing and Presentation; PHP muddles these. A framework can help unmuddle them.

I use Django as framework and Python as programming language. Your hosting site may not support this, in which case you may be in trouble.

The Web Frameworks list on Wikipedia is good. Zend and CodeIgniter are highly recommended in places like StackOverflow. However, here's a good Django vs. PHP comparison: The Onion Uses Django, And Why It Matters To Us.

"Because

Cleaner. Much cleaner. Proper unit testing. Real reusable components across applications. An ORM rather than a just a series of functional query helpers...."

Summary

1. Get an IDE to edit your pages. Komodo Edit.
2. Consider using RST and tools instead of raw HTML. Installing Python + DocUtils and using rst2html.py is easier than learning HTML.
3. Try to avoid PHP’s numerous pitfalls; ideally by avoiding PHP. Use Django + Python and create a real application that clearly separates the content (data model) from processing (view functions) from presentation (HTML templates)