Choosing a Web Development Tool
| The Linux web developer can choose among several good tools. What you choose depends on your skill level and what your comfort level with writing raw HTML is. For the BeginnerFor the absolute web page beginner, there's nothing better than OpenOffice.org's Writer/Web. OOo offers basic templates (called AutoPilots) for creating several types of pages, including various forms, two-column layouts, and even a photo album style. From the File menu, go to AutoPilot, Web Page. Figure 14.1 shows the Web Page AutoPilot dialog box. Figure 14.1. Choose one of many types of page templates with the OpenOffice.org AutoPilot. Note There are many schools of thought which question whether a beginner is better served by a set of templates or by learning the basic HTML tags. AutoPilot, and similar programs, are useful to a point, but you should still consider studying the basics of HTML if you expect to move beyond the very basics with your web skills. Many of the background layouts are somewhat garish and difficult to read, but they give you something to start with. Unlike Microsoft Word, Writer/Web delivers very clean and standards-based HTML code. The standard web page AutoPilot delivers easily editable code for any basic page, with links and navigation graphics, which you can see in Figure 14.2. Figure 14.2. Even a default OpenOffice.org template gives you plenty to work with. Note the navigation graphics, links, and Last Changed notice. A nice touch is the Last Changed note at the bottom of the page. This tells your visitors that the information on your site is current, or perhaps that it is not. The other office suites included with SUSE Linux all let you write HTML documents, but only OOo helps the novice with something to play with and learn from. The advantage of using a word processor such as OOo for website creation is that it's a familiar environment. Paragraph styles transfer easily from a standard document to the web, and for the most part it is more WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) than a specialized editor. Where the office suites fall short compared to more specialized web-development tools is in creating projects that link pages together in a coherent site. Applications such as Quanta and Bluefish offer advantages that we will explore later. Browser-Based Page CreatorsAn alternative to word processors are the browser-based page-creation tools. The genesis for these was Netscape's early decision to include Composer in its suite of Internet tools. This tool is still present in the official Netscape Communicator suite and with its open source Mozilla sibling. When the Mozilla project decided to break the components of the Netscape suite into sleeker, faster individual applications that still worked well together, some thought Composer might die. Coming to its rescue was Michael Robertson and his team from Linspire (formerly Lindows). They have shepherded the development of a new, simple page-creation tool called nvu (pronounced N-View). It fills the need for a simple tool for new users who don't need to build massive sites with lots of Flash and glitter, but have something to contribute. Specialized Web ToolsNext up on the scale are the special tools created for making websites. Like Microsoft FrontPage or Macromedia Dreamweaver, these applications handle all the relevant tasks in building a professional website, with the advantage of being free. Two of these have become the standard applications for Linux web developers:
Other tools that have gained some traction recently are Screem and Ginf; the latter pulled its name from the ever-reflexive GNU naming convention, "Ginf is not FrontPage." One difference between the Linux development tools and the Windows products mentioned earlier: These tools are proudly non-WYSIWYG, at least by default, preferring to show you the code first and testing the appearance later. What this means is that you have to know at least a little bit about HTML tagging and how it works before using these tools successfully. In our forthcoming example, we will not dwell extensively on what specific tags mean, but you will get a sense of how tagging works. Quanta is not as ruthlessly anti-WYSIWYG as Bluefish, though. With version 3.3, Quanta introduced the VPL (Visual Page Layout) editor, which can display in place of or in a dual view with the default (aka Source) editor. This is still a little buggy, but not bad for a first version. This is not to say that the only help you get from these tools are some extra toolbars that add a tag when you tell it. Quanta comes with an assortment of templates to handle all the basics of page creation, as you can see in Figure 14.3. No navigation tools are included, though. Figure 14.3. Quanta's basic HTML template creates a standard page heading and not much else. One thing you get with a web tool that you can't get with an ordinary word processor is the support for a variety of web technologies. It is often as easy to create an interactive PHP-based site, or any of several varieties of XML, as it is a static HTML page, if you know what you're doing. Both tools will also display your pages in most, if not all, prominent Linux web browsers. Bluefish and Quanta each handle this differently, however. Quanta displays pages in its own internal browser and in Konqueror, Mozilla, Netscape, Opera, and Lynx (a text-based browser). Bluefish handles Mozilla, Netscape, Opera, Galeon, and the GNOME default browser. You can add other browsers in the external preferences dialog box. Of course, you must have each browser installed on your system for this feature to work. Tip Do you want to test your pages on Microsoft Internet Explorer without leaving Linux? This is not easy, but it is possible. Internet Explorer will run under Wine, the Windows emulator, but it takes some work. After installing Wine (via YaST), download Hajime Segawa's script to install Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player from http://sidenet.ddo.jp/winetips/config.html. Extract the tarball to your home directory, and then read the readme.en file for instructions in how to run the script. When the script is finished, it opens a confirmation page in Internet Explorer, so you know you have a working copy on your system. Now add Internet Explorer to the browser list in Quanta or Bluefish.
Leave the other boxes as they are. Click OK to confirm. Both Quanta and Bluefish come with ample documentation for the product and reference manuals for HTML and PHP. Quanta also includes references for JavaScript and cascading style sheets (CSS). Übergeek Web Page ToolsYou know that a real Linux geek doesn't need a GUI tool to write for the web. It is just markup hypertext markup at that. Maybe all you need is a text editor and a tag reference guide. Rest assured that every text editor included with SUSE Linux is fully capable of producing perfect HTML code just the way you like it. Emacs, as per its reputation, not only comes with a web browser, but also has a major mode for Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), which means it will help you write to any Document Type Definition (DTD): HTML, XHTML, XML, and so on. Open or create any file with an HTML extension and Emacs will add the relevant menus to your display. All these things work in Xemacs as well. Vim has a Convert-to-HTML syntax file called 2HTML. Jedit also has a Code2HTML plug-in and plug-ins that will insert tags into your text. |
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