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Subject:Re: Recommended web site programs From:Julie Stickler <jstickler -at- gmail -dot- com> To:Robert Lauriston <robert -at- lauriston -dot- com> Date:Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:59:16 -0400
On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 4:05 PM, Robert Lauriston <robert -at- lauriston -dot- com> wrote:
> What are you producing, exactly, or are you just generally learning?
>
> If you want to learn about HTML and CSS, use your favorite text editor.
The problem with using a text editor to learn is that you have to know
what you're doing before you can get it to work. It's very hard to
debug your HTML when you're still learning.
The nice thing about a good HTML tool is that you can create what you
want in the WYSIWYG editor, then go look at the code to see which tags
were used to get the effect you were trying to achieve. Sort of
learning via reverse engineering the code.
I definately prefer using a WYSIWYG editor, then going under the
covers to see what worked. Because if you don't know how to do
something that requires something beyond a single set of tags (like
tables or multilevel lists) it is almost impossible to figure out how
the code should work when most tutorials are written to explain the
tags and not to show you how to actually use them out in the wild to
accomplish common tasks. I've gotten quite good at debugging my HTML
this way, altough I shudder to think about hand coding. Why make life
hard for youself when there are tools for that?
Free Software Documentation Project Web Cast: Covers developing Table of
Contents, Context IDs, and Index, as well as Doc-To-Help
2009 tips, tricks, and best practices. http://www.doctohelp.com/SuperPages/Webcasts/
Help & Manual 5: The complete help authoring tool for individual
authors and teams. Professional power, intuitive interface. Write
once, publish to 8 formats. Multi-user authoring and version control! http://www.helpandmanual.com/
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