web authoring for newbies? (and pros ;-)

[Simon Rönnqvist]

  Hi!

I think Nvu is what you're asking for, but not maybe not ultimately looking 
for. If you want let's say something similar to Dreamweaver, Nvu would 
probably be the closest match in the open source world. I only use it 
sometimes to edit static HTML-pages, but not to create them since I feel it 
doesn't give me enough control over the code. But if you don't care about 
what the HTML-code looks like, then that's not an issue. (If you like 
learning good practises you should care though.)

When it comes to creating web sites and not just editing content I'm not 
really creating HTML-documents directly... just editing code 
(HTML/XSLT-templates, PHP, etc.) eventually producing HTML-code dynamically, 
so a WYSIWYG like Nvu is usually no good for me.

Personally I use Quanta+, but then I'm also a web professional who likes 
editing code (XHTML, CSS, PHP and XSLT) with highlighting and autocompletion. 
(I also love the CSS editor that it has.) I haven't really found any other 
open source web editors with autocompletion, even though I know Bluefish is 
going to have sometime in the future. (Let me know if I missed any!) I also 
like Quanta+ because you can easily edit files on directly a server with it, 
since it's a KDE application. In KDE-apps you can open files over SFTP using 
a URL like fish://login@server/complete/path/to/directory/ .

If you really want to learn HTML (or preferably the newer version XHTML these 
days) then I'd recommend ditching WYSIWYG editors like Nvu and to go grab a 
book instead. In this case Quanta+ would probably be a good choise. Don't get 
me wrong, Nvu and other WYSIWYGs can be useful, but for a beginner they might 
tempt you into bad practises... So no matter what tools you use, go grab a 
good book on "standards based web design" using XHTML and CSS. Learning 
'traditional' web design (with table-layouts and all) like most do is 
learning something obsolete and cumbersome, even though it's tempting since 
it's easier to do with a WYSIWYG. But beware, in the long run you'd find 
yourself with web pages that are hard to manage and in many other ways not 
well done.

Good authors of standards based design books are Molly Holzschlag, Eric Meyer, 
Jefferey Zeldman and Dan Cederholm. My gut feeling tells me that Molly has 
the best to offer for beginners though. If you already know a bit of HTML and 
don't like lenthy texts then grab one of Dan's books. If you'd like more 
theory and background information then Jefferey's the man (well he is 
anyways :-). And if you want in depth explanations on CSS things then Eric is 
the guru for that. Once you get going a good site for articles is 
http://www.alistapart.com and sometimes also http://www.digital-web.com/
A good place for reference manuals is http://www.htmlhelp.com
And for a little teaser on what CSS can do for you, please visit: 
http://www.csszengarden.com

Once you've dug through some of this and created a few sites you'll probably 
know more about good web practise than most (so called?) web 
professionals. ;-) This is sad but true, but good for anybody who knows 
better and doesn't like competition.

  cheers, Simon


On Friday 03 March 2006 18:38, Stratos Laspas wrote:
> Hi there!
>
> Any suggestions for a linux web authoring tool?
> I know vi is the best :-) but how about a nice, graphical, easy to use,
> grow-as-you-go kind of editing/previewing/uploading/blogging one?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Stratos