HTML editors

[warty goblin]

The head of my sub-department (aka the person who runs the life of the person who runs my life) has asked me to write up a webpage. Which is a terrific opportunity that also pays, hampered only by the fact I've never written a line of HTML in my life.

Now I have done enough coding that I'm confident I can teach myself enough basic HTML to complete the assignment. Now obviously I could do the whole thing in Notepad, but that strikes me as a road to much suffering, since this page will need a lot of subsections and links to articles, etc. Not monstrously complex, but not 'Hello World' either.

So I'm turning to the collective expertise of the Playground. Does anybody have any suggestions for good, simple and free HTML editors? I don't need anything crazy advanced, just something that aids keeping track of tags, etc.

Thanks!

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by warty goblin
*...help.*

Whew. I was in exactly your situation when I was in grad school. I was handed responsibility for first one section of the website, and then for the entire departmental site. It paid, pathetically, but it was quite a thing to drop on an English major.


Originally Posted by warty goblin
Now obviously I could do the whole thing in Notepad, but that strikes me as a road to much suffering, since this page will need a lot of subsections and links to articles, etc.

I started out using a very simple HTML editor to build individual pages, but once I had a basic familiarity with the code I did indeed switch over to Notepad. I built several sites almost entirely with Notepad, which was cumbersome but worked for me.

Not sure if that entirely helps, but the Way of the Notepad can be done, and not really that painfully.

[warty goblin]

Whew. I was in exactly your situation when I was in grad school. I was handed responsibility for first one section of the website, and then for the entire departmental site. It paid, pathetically, but it was quite a thing to drop on an English major.

Ouch. At least I have the advantage of writing code all the time anyway, so I'm pretty familiar with hammering on a keyboard until the computer does what I want it to. On the other hand I have a significant dislike for markup languages, but hey, $500 and the subdepartment head not thinking I'm a useless slacker buys a person a lot of my attention.


I started out using a very simple HTML editor to build individual pages, but once I had a basic familiarity with the code I did indeed switch over to Notepad. I built several sites almost entirely with Notepad, which was cumbersome but worked for me.

Not sure if that entirely helps, but the Way of the Notepad can be done, and not really that painfully.
Fortunately I discovered that R (in which I do everything. Including dream) has a built-in HTML editor of sorts. I just need to install a package, so my open-source language can use open-source middleware to compile code. What could possibly go wrong?

[Palanan]

Ahh, you're an R person. I may be asking you for advice.

:smalltongue:

[warty goblin]

Ahh, you're an R person. I may be asking you for advice.

:smalltongue:
I have two pieces of advice for R:
1) Google
2) Suffer
After about six months or so, the Stockholme Syndrome sets in, and you stop wishing for things like the language being more than pretend object oriented, or that factors didn't suck quite so much.

In all seriousness, I'd be happy to help. Just shoot me a PM.

[TuggyNE]

So I'm turning to the collective expertise of the Playground. Does anybody have any suggestions for good, simple and free HTML editors? I don't need anything crazy advanced, just something that aids keeping track of tags, etc.

I use Notepad++ (http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/) for pretty much anything vaguely textish. It can do things like highlight matching tags, collapse tag sections, auto-fill matching end tags, colorize syntax, and so on; most of that is just automatically available.

[Flickerdart]

Sublime 2 is really good. Personally I use Dreamweaver's code view, but mostly out of habit.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by warty goblin
I have two pieces of advice for R:
1) Google
2) Suffer

You're really not making the case here. :smalltongue:


Originally Posted by warty goblin
In all seriousness, I'd be happy to help. Just shoot me a PM.

Thanks, I appreciate it. Most of my previous stats experience has been with SPSS, which at this point is a gold-plated brontosaur, and I've had R on my list as something I need to learn.

But, urf. A new environment like that is always a steep uphill climb for me.

:smallfrown:

[Ashtar]

I would recommend biting the bullet and learning a touch of CSS. Also, use a template that already exists, so as to get up and running with something that looks nice fast. Nothing worse in this day and age than a white page with a hello world h1 at the top. :D

I would recommend using Bootstrap as a base for your template. It's free and community supported, with plenty of customization available online. You should also have no trouble finding a video tutorial or two on it.

http://getbootstrap.com

For example, I found a channel with bootstrap tutorials on YouTube (haven't watched this one though) http://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKlA1QwYBcmcEUUBSmkl8_kgwn-_zuy-W&desktop_uri=%2Fplaylist%3Flist%3DPLKlA1QwYBcmcEUUB Smkl8_kgwn-_zuy-W

For the HTML editor, I've been using Microsoft Webmatrix, a free, fully featured editor to do my websites. Get it here: http://www.microsoft.com/web/webmatrix/

Hope this helps!

[Deadline]

Now obviously I could do the whole thing in Notepad, but that strikes me as a road to much suffering, since this page will need a lot of subsections and links to articles, etc. Not monstrously complex, but not 'Hello World' either.

What's wrong with Notepad?

These days I use Textpad, but it's pretty much the same deal.

[warty goblin]

I use Notepad++ (http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/) for pretty much anything vaguely textish. It can do things like highlight matching tags, collapse tag sections, auto-fill matching end tags, colorize syntax, and so on; most of that is just automatically available.
Thanks, that sounds like just the ticket, if I decide the inevitable goofy problems with R become too much of a PITA.


You're really not making the case here. :smalltongue:

R in one of those unfortunate things that's just good enough that it won't be replaced in a hurry.


Thanks, I appreciate it. Most of my previous stats experience has been with SPSS, which at this point is a gold-plated brontosaur, and I've had R on my list as something I need to learn.

But, urf. A new environment like that is always a steep uphill climb for me.
It is a bit of a slog. Fortunately the syntax is mostly pretty straightforwards. It's when you want to do something radical like, oh I don't know, ANOVA, that things get obnoxious. At some point you just give up on actually getting the built-in software to do contrasts and start hand-coding the bastards, and become resigned to running the model umpteen times to get the Type III sums of squares that have only been industry standard for thirty years now.


:smallfrown:
Indeed.


What's wrong with Notepad?

These days I use Textpad, but it's pretty much the same deal.
Nothing's wrong with it. Nothing's wrong with a manual typewriter either, but I'm still a fan of my word processor. Same thing here.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by warty goblin
It's when you want to do something radical like, oh I don't know, ANOVA, that things get obnoxious.

Lovely. ANOVAs would be one of the first things I'd want to do.


Originally Posted by warty goblin
At some point you just give up on actually getting the built-in software to do contrasts and start hand-coding the bastards, and become resigned to running the model umpteen times to get the Type III sums of squares that have only been industry standard for thirty years now.

Now I'm really not looking forward to it. Hand-coding this sort of thing is just not me.

Before SPSS, I briefly struggled with a truly horrid package called NTSYSpc, which requires you to work hands-on with all the individual operations which, in SPSS, are designed to automatically flow together. With NTSYSpc, you have to hand-code your module for eigenvectors, then take that output and hand-code for eigenvalues, etc. etc.

You probably would've fared much better than I did. For me, it was like climbing a frozen waterfall with my fingernails. I haven't been so frustrated by statistical coding since the unlamented days of PROC GLM. Not something I ever want to revisit.

[warty goblin]

Lovely. ANOVAs would be one of the first things I'd want to do.

Next you'll want to do something crazy like dynamically index a dataframe. Took me about two days to work out how to do that.




Now I'm really not looking forward to it. Hand-coding this sort of thing is just not me.
Just wait until you start multiplying vectors and matrices. R has some occasionally odd ideas about vector dimensions. Turn everything into row or column matrices and save yourself some pain.


Before SPSS, I briefly struggled with a truly horrid package called NTSYSpc, which requires you to work hands-on with all the individual operations which, in SPSS, are designed to automatically flow together. With NTSYSpc, you have to hand-code your module for eigenvectors, then take that output and hand-code for eigenvalues, etc. etc.

You probably would've fared much better than I did. For me, it was like climbing a frozen waterfall with my fingernails. I haven't been so frustrated by statistical coding since the unlamented days of PROC GLM. Not something I ever want to revisit.
Wait, you're complaining about PROC GLM? R will make you weep tears of blood. Running ANOVA in SAS is like getting an erotic massage from the underwear model of your choice compared to R's ANOVA, particularly if you want a contrast or a Cbeta test. The only thing more painful is trying to set up a mixed effects model, which in R boils down to which of several packages with unintelligible documentation and invariably crappy support for the option you want you hate the least.

Fortunately the math isn't that challenging, so I mostly just code my own now. One of the many reasons to never use anything but maximum likelihood estimation.

[Prime32]

I'm a fan of CoffeeCup (http://www.coffeecup.com/free-editor/) myself.

[Maryring]

I'm in a bit of a similar situation myself. I'm mostly trying to get the HTML and CSS documents done in Notepad++, though I'm mself looking for someplace where I can test to see what the code is actually gonna look like. That'll be the hard part.

[Flickerdart]

I'm in a bit of a similar situation myself. I'm mostly trying to get the HTML and CSS documents done in Notepad++, though I'm mself looking for someplace where I can test to see what the code is actually gonna look like. That'll be the hard part.
A browser?

[Ashtar]

At the risk of repeating myself, there's the free Webmatrix (http://www.microsoft.com/web/webmatrix/) or if you are prepared to wait a few days and pre-order for 129$ there's the gorgeous Macaw (http://macaw.co/).

Another option is CKEditor (http://ckeditor.com/) which is free and open source, a fully WYSIWYG HTML editor.

[Deadline]

Nothing's wrong with it. Nothing's wrong with a manual typewriter either, but I'm still a fan of my word processor. Same thing here.

I guess I've got to ask: what is it that you need that isn't present in a text editor? HTML is just that. It's not a complied language, so you don't need a compiler. You can view an html file in any browser, it doesn't have to be hosted on a web server to see the rendered html. What is it you want?

If it is Text-Highlighting you are after, then the aforementioned Textpad or Notepad++ will do that nicely. If you want one of those tools that lets you drag and drop or graphically build a page as if you were using a word processor (i.e. a WYSIWYG editor), then you want something like Microsoft's Expression Web (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=36179) or the Adobe Dreamweaver (http://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver.html) suite of tools. I'd caution against those, however, as while it will let you build a web page without writing a lick of HTML, the auto-generated HTML is, quite literally, awful. I haven't spotted an editor of this type that auto-generates clean HTML yet.

[Ashtar]

I don't know about you, but I haven't written one line of HTML in years. It's all generated now. You setup CSS classes for templating and generate articles from a back-end, be it in Node.js (Javascript), PHP or Asp.Net (C#).

Seriously, if you go for HTML5 and CSS, Boostrap for example, it's no longer about writing up HTML from scratch.

Otherwise, prepare your text in Markdown and process it to HTML using a post-processor or use Jerkyll (http://jekyllrb.com/) and go to town. You use LaTeX? Use LaTeX2HTML5 (http://latex2html5.com/).

Want just to publish? Spend your time on a Wordpress (https://wordpress.org/), Ghost (https://ghost.org/) or any other blogging platform or simple content management system.

Sure, a base understanding of the tag idea is useful, but really, don't spend time on HTML any more.

[Deadline]

I don't know about you, but I haven't written one line of HTML in years. It's all generated now. You setup CSS classes for templating and generate articles from a back-end, be it in Node.js (Javascript), PHP or Asp.Net (C#).

Well, yes, but I'm usually the one writing those systems. I truly despise auto-generation unless I'm in direct control of the code that does it. For web apps and the like, sometimes there is a need to insert HTML into a resource, and when those instances pop up, I prefer to do it by hand (because the auto-generation that is built into those tools always screws it up).

If all you want is a content management system, there are tons of useful ones out there. DNN, Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla, etc.


Seriously, if you go for HTML5 and CSS, Boostrap for example, it's no longer about writing up HTML from scratch.

Sadly, some of us still have to trudge around in the non-HTML5 world. Soon I'll be able to ditch support for those older platforms, my precious, soon. :smallbiggrin:

[Trixie]

Sure, a base understanding of the tag idea is useful, but really, don't spend time on HTML any more.

:smallsigh:

The thing is, auto-generated HTML is inefficient, blobby, and often horrifically hard to edit in something else or by hand if needed. True, it's no longer as bad as it used to be, and fast computers these days let you 'hide' inefficiency to a point, but all big projects where you need speed and efficiency are still done by hand at least on some step. You want the part user interacts with done well, you do it yourself, IMHO. And anyway, even if you use something to make HTML out of templates, I found my own front end to work better than default one most of the time.

[Penguinsushi]

*penguin flyby*

I've become a fan of Netbeans (https://netbeans.org/) - this is what I use at work as well as for personal projects. It does a good job highlighting most web languages, and has some decent css support built in. Code completion is pretty good, also. It's java based, and a little bit of a hog, but it's a pretty solid IDE. Also, cross-platform and free.

If all you're doing is HTML/CSS, it might be a little bit of overkill, though.

Notepad++ (which I've seen mentioned) is pretty good, too, if you're looking for something a little lighter.

~PS

[FLHerne]

If you're on Linux, I use KATE for editing just about everything. It has syntax highlighting for just about every obscure scripting language, Vi-emulation for keyboard editing, VCS integration and all sorts of other handy plugins. :smallsmile:

(Unless it's big chunks of C++ or PHP, because heavy-IDE-magic is nice there. KDevelop is just KATE++ anyway).

[hajo]

head of my sub-department .. asked me to write up a webpage. .. I've never written a line of HTML in my life.
Does anybody have any suggestions for good, simple and free HTML editors?

A portable suite for web-development:
* NVU / KompoZer (http://portableapps.com/apps/development/nvu_portable) HTML-Editor - a bit old, but still working
* Portable Webserver (http://portableapps.com/apps/development/xampp) Apache, MySQL, Perl, PHP, etc.
* Portable Filezilla (http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/filezilla_portable) FTP-Client for uploading your webpages

Plus related utilities, e.g. Browser (http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable), "normal" editor (http://portableapps.com/apps/development/notepadpp_portable), graphics (http://portableapps.com/apps/graphics_pictures/irfanview_portable), icons (http://portableapps.com/apps/graphics_pictures/icofx_portable) etc (http://portableapps.com/apps/graphics_pictures/picpick-portable). etc.

Also, I want to suggest one of the small CMS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_system) (content-management-systems) :
* CMSimple (http://www.cmsimple.org/) - small CMS, does not require a database
(As opposed to "big" CMS, like Drupal, Joomla, Typo3, Django etc., which will require a fair bit of learning and getting-used-to).

Essentially, you can use such a CMS to just organize all the pages, and generate a menu.
This would get you a complete, working website within a few hours.

The key here would be to just put in some content on 5-10 pages, so you have something to show, and talk about.
Leave the fiddling with the layout, colors, fonts etc. for later...
(Because working on such details can and *WILL* suck up much time)

Other options, depending on the kind (and size) of the content, how often it needs to be changed and the number of people involved:
* CMS geared for news ( phpnuke (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP-Nuke) etc.)
* Wiki (dokuwiki (https://www.dokuwiki.org/start), mediawiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki) ...)

BTW, all of the above are free tools ...

[CarpeGuitarrem]

If you have access to Dreamweaver, I've found it to have some nice IDE-esque features for HTML writing, like auto-suggesting tags or autocompleting the most recent tag when I start to type a closing tag. Plus, instant preview. And an easy way to organize your project.

So it is nice, just don't use it to mock up a site and then generate the HTML from that.

[ObadiahtheSlim]

I use Notepad++ (http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/) for pretty much anything vaguely textish. It can do things like highlight matching tags, collapse tag sections, auto-fill matching end tags, colorize syntax, and so on; most of that is just automatically available.

I wanna give another shout out to Notepad++. It's everything I want with a text editor. You can even get Textpad style cursor movement with a little bit of python.

[Seerow]

I also use Notepad++ for anything web related. I have Netbeans as well, but I don't think I've ever used it for anything but Java (and I stopped using that in favor of Eclipse about a year ago)

[CarpeGuitarrem]

Notepad++ is absolutely rad, aye.

[The Prince of Cats]

And another Notepad++ user here. I used to use SciTE, but I think Notepad++ is a more user-friendly use of Scintilla.

Originally, I used vanilla notepad.exe back in the 90s after getting fed up with the ugly code I used to get out of WYSIWYG editors. I went through a few editors with syntax highlighting, then a programmer at the studio I worked for introduced me to SciTE when I was using an XML based scripting language for video-game AI files. Also used VI (once, to prove a point) and Visual Studio's HTML Express version, but Notepad++ is my current favourite.