HTML editors

What are HTML editors: programs that can help us when building a web page.

We are going to talk in this article about HTML editors, the programs that help us to create web pages with the HTML language.

HTML editors can be of two types, as we will see, some allow pages to be coded using the HTML language itself, based on tags, and others allow us to design a web page, as if we were writing with an advanced text editor, without having to than writing the code with the tags. This last aspect, which we can call editors in design mode, presents an additional facility for people who do not want to complicate their lives with the HTML language, because they do not have time to learn it or because they feel incapable of doing so. Editors in design mode allow us to create the page as if we were writing a document with a Word-type editor. The HTML editor is in charge of dealing with the language and internally programming the page with the HTML code, according to what we are designing.

With the HTML editor in design view we can place images, define styles, use bold or italics, etc. without worrying about the labels corresponding to each style or element. It is the editor who knows these tags and uses them appropriately. This type of HTML editors in design mode are called, in technical language WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) because when you work with them, what you see that you are creating with the editor is what you get later when you save the page.

There are two trends, therefore, among developers who are dedicated to making web pages. On the one hand we have people who prefer to create pages by programming HTML and on the other, people who use HTML editors in design mode. Some differences between doing it in one way or another are the following:

Writing the HTML With a WYSIWYG editor You dominate the code of the page more precisely, it is cleaner. If you master HTML well you will never have any problem to do what you want. The code on the page has poorer quality, and may even have errors, more or less visible, that are difficult to fix. It is the machine that dominates the work. Learning is more complicated, slower and when you reach an advanced level it also becomes considerably more difficult. Learning is very simple, just like working in Word. It’s just about managing one more program. Making a page costs more work and time. It’s very fast.

Each one must choose the path that suits them best or the one that seems most attractive to them. In any case, you can always start in one mode and then switch to the other mode without any problem. Even, to anticipate events, we would say that when a person delves into the design of web pages, there comes a time when they need to know the two ways of building webs. HTML programmers will need to learn an editor because that will increase their productivity and those who use editors will need to learn a bit of HTML to fix something the editor has done wrong or do something the editor can’t do.

This manual is written by a person who learned to make his first websites with it and sometimes you can see my greater inclination to write the HTML code myself. Although my advice is to learn HTML, I’m sure many would prefer a design mode editor to make things easier. If the WYSIWYG HTML editor is good and we master it perfectly, perfect results can be obtained.

HTML editors WYSIWYG design mode

There are many HTML WYSIWYG editors on the market, it is important to choose a good editor because our work will depend on its results. Currently the king of editors and the one we recommend without a doubt is , manufactured by Adobe.

Other possibilities are editors like:

Text editors ready to write HTML code

People who after these lines have decided to learn the HTML language also have very interesting tools to increase their productivity while still writing the HTML they want. These are text editors, like any other, that are prepared to write HTML and therefore offer a multitude of aids to designers:

• They can have open and edit several files at the same time
• They color the page codes to make them more understandable.
• They usually support other programming languages ​​with which we can get to work in the development of web pages.
• They offer programming aids, which are often contextual and are activated as we make the pages.
• And also, many of them have integrated tools to do things as varied as code generation, wizards, FTP connection modules with the server, etc.

Depending on the chosen program we will have some tools and aids or others. It is simply choosing the one that best suits our needs. Some examples are:

• free and open source.
• which was fine, although Adobe hasn’t updated it for years.
• which is an editor for programmers of the most popular.
• which works on all operating systems.

If we decide to write the source code in HTML, it will be highly recommended to use any of these programs, to feel more comfortable when programming the pages and to be able to make them faster. However, it should be remembered that any text editor would be useful for making web pages, even , which is the simplest editor that exists for plain text, but using one of these programs will be essential over time.

In the we have descriptions of some , both in design mode and writing the code.