Chapter 18. Getting Started with a Web Authoring Program

When you work in a WYSIWYG Web page editor (like Netscape Composer, included with this book), your page looks (with minor exceptions) just the way it will look to most visitors on the Web.

That's a powerful convenience; without it, Web authors have had to guess about the appearance of their pages while fiddling with all the HTML code. To check their work, authors had to open the file in a browser and then go back to the HTML code to make adjustments. With a WYSIWYG editor, you can see and do it all in one window, live and in color .

This chapter examines the general operation of Composer so that you know your way around when you approach the specific authoring tasks coming up in later chapters.

This chapter assumes that you have already installed Netscape Communicator 4.7 and its built-in Web-authoring program, Composer. If you have not, visit http://wp.netscape.com/download/archive.html and download Netscape Communicator version 4.7 for your system. (It's free.)

More recent versions of Netscape and Composer are available, as well. Although the exact steps for some features might differ slightly, you'll have little difficulty finding your way around a newer version of Composer using the material in this book.