Text tools reduce Web pages to their raw elements: plain text and HTML tags. They make little effort to show you how your documents will appear in a Web browser. Although editing a Web page in a text editor may not be beautiful, text-based tools offer powerful features most graphical tools lack
Tonya Engst
Bare Bones Software's BBEdit 4.0 is one of the most powerful HTML-editing tools you'll find, and it deserves serious consideration for anyone's HTML toolkit -- even if you prefer to do initial page designs in a graphical tool such as PageMill. Included with BBEdit is a set of plug-ins that help create HTML documents; additional plug-ins available on the Internet provide other features such as support for tables.
BBEdit's HTML commands simplify tasks such as setting background colors, configuring links, and adding graphics. Drag-and-drop aficionados will find much to make them happy -- for instance, to create a link to another file in a site, you drag that file's icon from the Finder to the document window.
BBEdit's spelling checker is smart enough not to flag HTML tags as misspelled words, and its sophisticated text-manipulation features can quickly become indispensable. Although learning the grep pattern-matching search-and-replace system can be tricky, we found BBEdit's manual and Apple Guide file to be extremely helpful in explaining how to create complex search patterns. You can search multiple documents at once and organize documents into virtual "groups" for convenient mass searches, a boon to those who must manage and update Web sites. Also useful is a system that allows you to automatically update repeating elements (such as footers or images) on all pages in a Web site. And although BBEdit can't display pages graphically, it can have your Web browser of choice preview them.
Although BBEdit's HTML plug-ins add a powerful array of features for creating and checking HTML, we found BBEdit's HTML tools a little awkward. To use a tool, you must choose it from a drop-down menu or a floating palette, which takes some getting used to. Most of the commands do not have keyboard shortcuts, and the process for assigning shortcuts is cumbersome.
In the fast-moving world of Web authoring, the biggest strength of BBEdit may be its adaptability. Since BBEdit's HTML commands are in the form of plug-ins, programmers can quickly update BBEdit when new HTML tags hit the scene.
Although many word processors deal with HTML by taking a native, fully formatted document and translating it into HTML, Nisus Software's Nisus Writer 4.1 works like a traditional text editor. The word processor and its included HTML macros offer features that make serious HTML coders drool, including multiple undos and pattern-matching search-and-replace. An included macro can approximate how your document will look in a Web browser, although the applied styles are updated only when you run the macro. Nisus Writer's unique ability to select noncontiguous blocks of text makes it possible to select all the text you'd like to give a certain style and then tag it all with a single command.
Nisus Writer isn't a complete solution: The macros don't support an extensive variety of tags (they don't support table tags, for example), and they can't put up dialog boxes that walk you through complex coding situations. You can create your own macros, although it takes time to learn Nisus' macro language. Nisus Writer lacks features such as the ability to convert graphics to JPEG or GIF format and color wheels for selecting background and text colors.
One other note: Joe Kissell's excellent book The Nisus Way (1996) explains Nisus Writer far better than the product's own confusing documentation, and its companion CD-ROM include a 90-day trial version of Nisus Writer and an extended version of Nisus' HTML macros, which include macros for the creation of HTML forms. Novices, note: Nisus Writer can be a daunting application, with a steep learning curve.
BBEdit 4.0
Offering incredible editing power, BBEdit deserves a place in everyone's HTML toolkit.
Nisus Writer 4.1
A word processor doubling as a text editor, Nisus Writer is daunting but feature-rich.
