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**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [September 21, 1999, 4:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/html-coders-help/3403 "1999-09-21T04:59:00Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 10\
**Page:** 2
**Author:**  [@system](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/system)\
**Post date:** [September 22, 1999, 12:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/html-coders-help/3403/21 "1999-09-22T12:53:00Z")
Well, not in my experience. Too many (DIV)s and (TH)s etc. which are totally redundant tags. Though worse than that was, a friend of mine who had only ever used Claris for her web design was so sadly ignorant of too many of the basic tags, just because they weren’t available as options on any of the program menus. Things like aligning images, and column spans and stuff.
Anyhoo, having said that, I understand Frontpage 2000 isn’t so bad these days; much better than its earlier incarnations.
(Someone cleaned this up for him)
[Note: This message has been edited by Nickrz]
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**Author:**  [@GuanoLad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GuanoLad)\
**Post date:** [September 22, 1999, 12:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/html-coders-help/3403/22 "1999-09-22T12:55:00Z")
Ah shit, who turned the HTML code on in this doggone forum?
Sorry! Can someone clean that up for me?
_shucks_
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**Author:**  [@JoeyBlades](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JoeyBlades)\
**Post date:** [September 22, 1999, 2:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/html-coders-help/3403/23 "1999-09-22T14:14:00Z")
GuanoLad wrote (very peculiarly):
> [@](#):
>
> Anyhoo, having said that, I understand Frontpage 2000 isn’t so bad these days
Don’t you believe it. I tried it about a month ago, believing the advertisements that claimed that it didn’t monkey around with your html code… big lie! Everytime it hit a tag that it didn’t understand it freaked out in it’s formatting in the wysiwyg display plus transformed my html into something completely unrecognizable. Of course, Netscape Composer always rewrites my code.
I’m a hand-edit kind of guy and have been for a long time. I use Alpha on the Mac which has lots of built-in html tools (including a web-lint which does some basic syntax checking and detects missing or superflouous tags) and makes hand editing nearly painless. I also have a handful of homegrown perl gizmos that make certain things easier. The only reason I tried FrontPage was because I was using a Windoze platform and I couldn’t find anything comparable to Alpha. I’ve tried lots of wysiwyg html editors and none of them have been worth a damn, though I do admit that I sometimes use Netscape Composer to build very complex (nested) tables, then cut & paste the relevant html code into my target code (after a bit of dusting and cleaning).
Call me a nerd or a snob or both, but the best web pages are coded by hand! This is because you can do things in raw html that you can’t do in even the best wysiwyg html editors.
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**Author:**  [@Gaudere](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gaudere)\
**Post date:** [September 22, 1999, 3:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/html-coders-help/3403/24 "1999-09-22T15:02:00Z")
Yay for handcoders! I’ll admit I use FrontPage sometimes, but then I have to go into the raw HTML anyway to clean it up. Ye Gods, the sheer proliferation of font tags! I’ve had _three_ font tags pop up, modifying an _empty space_. But it’s nice for tables. I use HomeSite at work, which is nice if you turn off the automatic tag closer thing. You can’t beat handcoding for clean code that’s as fast to download as possible.
Gr8Kat, of you just want to stick in that snippet of code, it can go anywhere in an existing page (well, anywhere that doesn’t break up a tag or move around stuff you want to stay where it is).
* * *
“Eppur, si muove!” - Galileo Galilei
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**Author:**  [@tanstaafl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tanstaafl)\
**Post date:** [September 22, 1999, 3:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/html-coders-help/3403/25 "1999-09-22T15:28:00Z")
For those of you who hand-code your html, there is a really good html editor called EZPad. I found it on [download.com](http://download.com). It’s freeware. It is an editor that lets you hand code your html (with automatic > generation and wizards for things like tables and imagemaps). It also has a tab you can click on to show you what your page will display as. (You can’t edit in the display mode, but it is easy to flip back and forth.) Best of all, its free!
I think it is only for Windows though… I don’t know of anything for Mac or Linux.
(Oh yes, I have nothing to do with the people who make EZPad. I just thought some of you may be interested.)
* * *
“You can’t run away forever; but there’s nothing wrong with getting a good head start.” — Jim Steinman
Dennis Matheson — [Dennis@mountaindiver.com](mailto:Dennis@mountaindiver.com)
Hike, Dive, Ski, Climb — [www.mountaindiver.com](http://www.mountaindiver.com)
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**Author:**  [@JoltSucker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JoltSucker)\
**Post date:** [September 23, 1999, 5:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/html-coders-help/3403/26 "1999-09-23T05:41:00Z")
It looks like GuanoLad ran into the same problem that I’ve run into here in posting HTML. The HTML looks great in VisualPage and Netscape, but when you paste it into the reply window and hit “Submit Reply”, the formatting goes all to hell. I think UBB’s handling of HTML is not ready for primetime. I had posted a table, and while the table itself looked fine, it was preceeded by **serveral pages** of blank screen. VisualPage inserts a lot of blank lines and indents to make the HTML readable, but I think UBB interprets them as spaces.
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**Author:**  [@Nickrz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nickrz)\
**Post date:** [September 22, 1999, 9:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/html-coders-help/3403/27 "1999-09-22T21:49:00Z")
Guano, you missed my point. Claris does a good enough job if you _don’t_ want to fool around with html. Why worry about redundant tags if you’re not looking at them? And why worry about being ignorant of html coding if you didn’t want to fool around with it in the first place? That’s the whole purpose of a GUI.
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**Author:**  [@GuanoLad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GuanoLad)\
**Post date:** [September 23, 1999, 9:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/html-coders-help/3403/28 "1999-09-23T09:57:00Z")
Thanks for fixing my mess, Nickrz. 🙂
I think the fact that some important formatting tags not being available to
a Claris user is significant enough, especially when it comes to aligining
images for text flow.
But I’m a handcoder using Homesite (for Mac users, that’s a program much
like BBEdit) and I feel so much happier knowing what I’m doing, including
code on a page that I know I put in myself, and having handy gadgets like
the extended find and replace, or the drag and drop images.
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**Author:**  [@JoeyBlades](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JoeyBlades)\
**Post date:** [September 23, 1999, 1:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/html-coders-help/3403/29 "1999-09-23T13:38:00Z")
Nickrz asks:
> [@](#):
>
> Why worry about redundant tags if you’re not looking at them?
If you’re just working with small html files where the pages are only accessed a few times a day, then you’re right - superfluous tags are of no consequence. If, on the otherhand, you’re dealing with rather large html segments and you’re getting 1000’s of hits a day, the extra crap that wysiwyg editors throw in can impact performance in a measurable way.
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**Author:**  [@moriah](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/moriah)\
**Post date:** [September 23, 1999, 1:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/html-coders-help/3403/30 "1999-09-23T13:40:00Z")
Gr8Kat,
Once you open the insert HTML box, and click on help, it will tell you how to do it. In a nutshell, you **don’t** put the whole HTML phrase in the box, you only put one open and close bracket expression
at a time. For example, if I wanted to italicize a word, say _foo_, I would type in the box:
\
and then close the box (click OK). Then I’d type _foo_ in the regular text screen. Then I’d open the insert HTML box again and type
\
and click OK. Each element of a coded phrase gets its own box and icon.
But, of course, it would be easier to simply highlight _foo_ and hit the italics button. In the same way, it’s easier to highlight the phrase you want to be a link and choose Insert Link.
Peace.
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