Could you make a crappier HTML editor ?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Pasta Bolognese
  • Start date Start date
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Pasta Bolognese

Open VS.2003.

Click on a control on an aspx page in the HTML view.

Does it tell me the pixel position on the page?

Nooooooooooo.................
 
Pasta said:
Open VS.2003.

Click on a control on an aspx page in the HTML view.

Does it tell me the pixel position on the page?

Nooooooooooo.................
Click to expand...

What do you consider a 'GOOD' HTML editor? I do all mine is Notepad.
 
Quantum said:
What do you consider a 'GOOD' HTML editor? I do all mine is Notepad.
Click to expand...

You mean Knote, surely?

What about Quanta? Any good for making mass changes across many html files,
/a la/ DW templates?
 
In comp.os.linux.advocacy, Pasta Bolognese
<[email protected]>
wrote
Open VS.2003.

Click on a control on an aspx page in the HTML view.

Does it tell me the pixel position on the page?

Nooooooooooo.................
Click to expand...

Has it occurred to you that "pixel position" within an HTML
page is a useless concept? Especially since HTML browsers
can be resized, making a paragraph variable height?

That said, it would be nice to see an editor which knew
how to edit at least two things at once: the HTML page
proper, and a style sheet or set of style sheets associated
therewith, and update the HTML as the style sheets are
tweaked. (Bluefish can edit multiple pages but cannot
render, although it can punt to Netscape. OO can read but
AFAICT cannot write style sheets. Amaya is close but has
some problems, and cannot render frames; I don't think it
can auto-update its displayed HTML when a style changes,
either -- even when it's changing the style. Then again,
I've not played with it in a while. Also, Amaya doesn't
do things at the style/color/font level; one has to
edit the tags directly -- which is fine if one happens
to know HTML, but I suspect not everyone does.)

Repeat after me:

HTML is not PDF.
HTML is not PDF.
HTML is not PDF.
....

:-)
 
In comp.os.linux.advocacy, Pasta Bolognese
<[email protected]>
wrote
Right. And your pages probably look like this:

http://www.balloonman.cc/
Click to expand...


Woooooooo....glitter...... :-) Not to mention multicolored text
and a rotating image separator.

Yeah, takes me right back to the 80's or early 90's. Where's Minsky
when you really *need* him? :-)

I'll give him credit for not using the BLINK tag and annoyingly
animated GIFS, though. And apparently he's not yet discovered
the joys of *cough* balloon text. (Then again, he's great with
the balloons. I just can't say the same for his HTML.)
 
The said:
Has it occurred to you that "pixel position" within an HTML
page is a useless concept?
Click to expand...

But I'm thinking about absolute positioning.

That said, it would be nice to see an editor which knew
how to edit at least two things at once: the HTML page
proper, and a style sheet or set of style sheets associated
therewith, and update the HTML as the style sheets are
tweaked.
Click to expand...

Ok, let me tell you about my day today.

Web Form for an e-commerce site. Working on validation for an ASP:Label for
a credit card number. There were 3 levels of validation. A required field
validation control to make sure they entered somthing. A regular
expression validation control to make sure that they entered a credit card
number in the rigth format ( each type, VISA, MC, etc has a certain
sequence, number of digits and leading numbers -- all VISAs start with 4,
e.g.) and then a label control that was written to by a codebehind method
with the standard algorithm to make sure that the whole cc number is valid.

In any instance, either none were visible or one was visible, and I wanted
them to show up in the same place on the right of the text input field.

ASP:Validation controls don't have a style attribute. You can put one in,
manually in the HTML code, but the problem is that if you manipulate it in
the editor it erases it! ( It also always removes formatting as far as the
code layout of the HTML in the aspx page -- so if you format the code for
easy reading, by putting carriage returns after attributes, it resets those
and strings it out 200, 300 characters to the right. And it also randomly
deletes event handlers from the Init method...which impacted me because I
use the codebehind to change the regular expressions when the user selects
a different credit card type...).

Anyway, after getting shot down using STYLE I decided to use the CssStyle
attribute which is an /official/ property of an ASP control. So I added a
STYLE block to the top and made some style elements for the controls. Each
control and the label were 70px wide. So I made one element have LEFT:
-70px and the other -140px. This way they would all align in the same
place.

Then, of course, in the editor, they all align on top of one another, so
selecting the ones on the bottom to make changes was well nigh
impossible....well, you can see where the time goes....
 
Quizzical said:
You mean Knote, surely?

What about Quanta? Any good for making mass changes across many html
files, /a la/ DW templates?
Click to expand...

Nah.... to fancy.... Notepad.exe makes a good HTML editor if you know what
your doing....
 
Pasta said:
Right. And your pages probably look like this:

http://www.balloonman.cc/
Click to expand...

Very funny, no even close. I currently don't have any up right now but I
used to have a page on icons for Windows, I never got around to putting
back up after @Home died. Even after all this time, I can still find dozens
of links to my old webpage. I never did find a HTML editor that would
render it correctly even though Netscape and IE would show it fine.
If you have to use on of the 'Fancy' editor, your screwed if you have to
fix a low level problem.
 
Quantum said:
I never did find a HTML editor that would
render it correctly even though Netscape and IE would show it fine.
If you have to use on of the 'Fancy' editor, your screwed if you have to
fix a low level problem.
Click to expand...

Well -- bottom line is I kind of agree with you.

Let's remember what the magic of HTML or any programming language is: c#,
java, ASP.... The idea is not to sit and draw on the screen and make it
*look* right. The idea is to ABSTRACT something, in CODE, and by using
and manipulating the syntax of the programming language, have it produce a
result -- even if that result is visual.

For me -- I can think in HTML, or javascript, or DHTML ( or c, or c#, or
java ) and *see* what I think it's going to do ( then I look at it and do a
bunch of bug fixes ). HTML is a *programming* language -- much as the c
bigots dispute it -- but only in the hands of a real webmaster -- and by
real I don't mean a 'graphic designer' -- I mean what I just said. Someone
who lets the language do the layout because they understand how to
manipulate the language....
 
Quantum said:
Very funny, no even close. I currently don't have any up right now but I
used to have a page on icons for Windows, I never got around to putting
back up after @Home died. Even after all this time, I can still find dozens
of links to my old webpage. I never did find a HTML editor that would
render it correctly even though Netscape and IE would show it fine.
If you have to use on of the 'Fancy' editor, your screwed if you have to
fix a low level problem.
Click to expand...

I do all my HTML in Notepad as well; as can be seen at pictures dot
alancode dot net; and admittedly it's not good (I'm a HTML newbie) it's okay
 
I do all my HTML in Notepad as well; as can be seen at pictures dot
alancode dot net; and admittedly it's not good (I'm a HTML newbie) it's
okay
Click to expand...

There's nothing wrong with starting with Notepad when you're new to HTML.
My first few pages were done entirely in Notepad. Doing a few pages this
way makes you learn how to create HTML code, whereas with an HTML IDE, you
learn how to use the IDE rather than HTML. Later on, an IDE will be a
tremendous timesaver, but you can use your knowledge of HTML to fine tune
the code that the IDE produces.
 
Schfooge said:
There's nothing wrong with starting with Notepad when you're new to HTML.
My first few pages were done entirely in Notepad.
Click to expand...

Right on.

Notepad is the only editor.

Except for KWrite
 
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