Web Design Tools

One of the simplest web page design tools is the text editor vi because web pages are really nothing more than text files with HTML formatting tags included. Few people want to use such a simple tool for web page design, however. Although the Windows and Mac world have emphasized WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) web page design tools, for the most part Linux users have opted for what amounts to fancy text editors such as the Quanta Plus application provided with Fedora Core.

Quanta Plus is located in the Programming Tool, More Programming Tools menu. Launching the application presents you with a three-panel view: a file tree on the left, a files display on the upper right, and a tabbed logging window on the bottom right. You can preview your file in different browsers so that you can see how the browsers will display the code. Quanta uses the concept of "projects" to manage common pages from a website, downloading and uploading the pages for site maintenance. Quanta offers syntax checking for code debugging, as well as a number of tools for advanced page elements such as tables, lists, and forms. Its user interface is well designed and intuitive, as shown in Figure 9.10.

Figure 9.10. Quanta Plus is a feature-rich HTML editor and web development tool that is well-integrated into KDE.

The following are some of the many web development tools that are not provided with Fedora Core:

• Bluefish Found at http://bluefish.openoffice.nl/.com, Bluefish is a GTK-based HTML editor similar in function to Quanta Plus. It supports anti-aliased fonts and UTF8 encoding, so it is compatible with Fedora Core Linux.

• IBM WebSphere Studio Homepage Builder A commercial application, available at http://www-3.ibm.com/software/awdtools/hpbuilder/, is a WYSIWYG editor from Big Blue.

• Coffee Cup A free commercial editor available at http://www.coffeecup.com/linux/, Coffee Cup provides a number of preconfigured templates and Java code examples.

OpenOffice.org (included with Fedora Core Linux) can also be used as an effective HTML editor. From the File:Autopilot menu in OpenOffice.org Writer, you select the Web Page Wizard to create HTML pages.

NOTE

Fedora includes a wealth of other tools you can use to create web pages or intranet content. See Chapter 19, "Apache Web Server Management," for information on how to set up, start, and run Apache, the web server for Fedora.