Web Design & Development

[ Web Design & Development Topics ]

Web Authoring

Web publishing/authoring is the creating of Web documents. It is very similar to using a word processor. However there are a few key differences:

1. with Web pages you generally edit locally and then publish to a web server.
2. with Web pages separate text and graphical components on the pages (they are separate files).
3. with Web pages you use links to navigate through pages.

You have a number of alternatives for writing for the Web. Lets consider the basic criteria below.

Web Authoring Options

There are two types of Web authoring environments you may want to work in and which may affect your decisions on what to use

• WYSIWYG (Wizzie-Wig) - What You See Is What You Get. These work like a desktop publishing program (point and click)
• Code-based Editor - Made for editing the source code, may have color coding or the like to assist in code development
• Compound Editor - Does both WYSIWYG and code-based. Usually you can toggle between the two.

If you want WYSIWYG or a Compound Editor you will need some type of Web authoring software, which we will cover next. As you have learned from this class though, you don't need Web authoring software in order to make Web pages. Almost any language (ASP, PHP, Perl, CF, etc) can be written with a simple text editor like Notepad or Wordpad at no cost to you.

Web Authoring Software

Generally speaking, Web Authoring is considered to be software that is used to develop a Web site in a desktop publishing format on your local machine. The software is WYSIWYG and generates the HTML for you.