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I created the first version of this site using with SemWare's Qedit DOS-based text editor, mostly as an exercise to teach myself how to write HTML. Since that time, a lot of HTML editors have been released, including a number of macro packages for use with popular word processors, WYSIWYG or semi-WYSIWYG HTML editors and format-conversion packages to permit translating existing documents from proprietary formats into HTML via user-defined templates and/or style sheets. I've tried many of these programs, and I've settled, instead, on the 32-bit edition of Programmer's File Editor. I can't say enough good things about this freeware text editor. I use it constantly, for almost everything. Then again, since I occasionally conduct seminars and tutorials about the Web and Web technologies, I still enter a lot of HTML by hand, just to stay familiar with it. There's absolutely no need for you to try this at home.. I do use Netscape Communicator to create tables for the Services for the 21st Century Web site and for my e-zine, Reality Check, but I hate the way it proliferates font tags, (and removes my carefully-placed double quotes around tag arguments,) so I use it as sparingly as possible. Image Editors Most of my friends in the professional Web site development community use Adobe's PhotoShop for image manipulation and Freehand for producing original art. Most of them do image manipulation and art on PowerMacs, too. I work on a WinTel machine and I use the 32-bit version of MicroGrafx Corporation's Picture Publisher for most of my image capture and manipulation needs. I also did virtually all of the original art for this site using Picture Publisher. To designate transparent colors for the GIF I use as an image map on the Home Page, the link images down the ide of each page and the left margin of the billboard graphic at the top of each page, I used the 32-bit version of Lview Pro (which I also used to fine-tune the alignment of the "handwritten" text at the top of each page). To make the animated GIF you can download from the About This Site Page, I used Alchemy Mindworks' GIF Construction Set. Creating image maps by hand is a pain in the posterior. Everyone uses image map editors to ease the agony, and I'm no exception. (Look, I may be a glutton for punishment, but I'm not stupid. Writing HTML code by hand is one thing. Counting pixels by hand is quite another..) To build the NCSA-format server-side image map code I experimented with (and later abandoned) for the marginal links in interior pages like this one, I used the highly-popular, 32-bit freeware MS Windows image map editor, Map This! (which supports CERN-style server-side maps, and client-side maps, as well). For the client-side code, I used the image map editor built into WebEdit Pro, although I could just as easily have used Map This!, instead. One of my primary design considerations was to maintain downward compatibility for early-generation browsers. Thus, I checked each page with Lynx, a line-mode browser which a lot of shell-connected Unix Websurfers use, and with both Microsoft's Internet Explorer version 3.0 and Netscape's Navigator Gold version 3.0 to ensure lowest-common-denominator graphical browser compatibility. I also used both Microsoft's Internet Explorer version 4.0 and Netscape's Communicator Gold version 4.0 to do the primary site design checking. Since, between them, they own over 90% of the browser market, I wanted to make sure that each of these pages looks equally good when viewed in either browser. Do you like the result? Go back to the top of this page. Go back to the Javascript Tricks Page. Go back to the HTML Tricks Page. Go back to the Design Considerations Page. Go back to the History of This Site Page. Go back to the About This Web Site Page.
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