ZapHTML

What is ZapHTML?

ZapHTML is an extension mode for Zap text editor to render HTML documents in the same way that Zap renders BASIC or C. It does such useful things as colouring tags and converting key presses of "<" to <. It's called ZapHTML because that is less of a mouthfull than "HTML mode for Zap".

Finally, here is a screenshot of ZapHTML in action

What stage is development at?

The current version is: 0.02Beta

Where can I get a copy?

At the moment you can download it via http with this link.

I hope to have it on an ftp site soon too.

How goes development?

Slowly, but I am getting there. Things I have done so far for v0.03Beta are:

Added html directory recognition so files in a directory called "html" will be loaded into HTML mode.
Removed all the individual tag pair commands and replaced them with a generic HTMLTAGPAIR command.
Included TAB completion of filenames in link & img tags.

What's in the pipe-line?

This is what I am going to implement

A menu of all the commands. Showing the keyboard short-cuts
Commands to insert the special HTML version identifier comment line
Support for form tags
Support for HTML3 tags

Here are the ideas generated by my Beta testers

A different colour for quoted text inside tags
A different colour for URL's
Commonly used tags to have seperate colours. e.g. <A>, <IMG>
Launch ARCWeb command for URL's
Launch ANT internet suite for URL's
Filename completion for anchor tags
Allow the entry of "1c" for the heading tag to get centred level one heading.
A fully comprehensive selection of Entities.
Highlight the text effected by an open/close pair of tags
An option to turn off the sc[ sc] insertion of < > and have the < and > keys do it instead.
Switch to HTML keymap permanently
Netscape extensions
Different colours for different levels of tags. i.e. HTML2 tags, HTML3 tags, Netscape tags
"Preview mode" where the tags are hidden but the text they act on is highlighted.
"Sanity checker" make sure all quotes are closed, all tags are matched an so on. How about I convert WebLint and have an option to call it? (\/)
Draging a file to the window adds a link to it. Off the top of my head I think this would be quite tricky

I would like you to comment on them. Do so by mailing me

Reported bugs

The redraw code is not 100% acurate at re-colouring the text. Update - it is turning out to be less than 50% acurate :-(
The IMG tag does strange things with selected text. I need to check the whole selected text business out.
Entities (&) inside a tag or comment gets coloured and the colour is returned to text colour when it has finished.

Connected developments

Andrew Ward is working on a a routine to swap / with . so the finished pages will work on a UNIX server. If he is feeling particularly keen he may add a bit that detects the filetype of the file and automaticaly adds the correct extension. At the moment however it simply does the filename conversions. This program will be incorporated into my mode. He has also written a nice little utilitie which will take many of the standard WWW graphics formats and return their width and height for inclusion in the IMG tag.

Do we get some history then?

If you like. The history goes something like this:

0.01Beta: The first release. Posted to comp.binaries.acorn because people where talking about HTML editors in the c.s.a.* groups. Generated a goodly number of Beta testers.
0.02Beta: Minor bug fixes. corrected Remark tag. Improved distribution directory organisation and instalation instructions.

So who are the Beta testers?

The galent few who daily risk life and limb by using my program are: (In the order that they E-mailed me)

If, for any reason, you don't want your name on this list just E-mail me and I will remove it. If, however, you would like to become a Beta tester then please feel free to E-mail me and have your name put on this list.

These pages where last updated on the 22nd of February 1996.