Chapter 10: Editing HTML and XML Markup

Overview

10-Second Summary

• View both Web page code and visible design for a page with Split View

• Write code faster and more accurately with Code IntelliSense

• Store and re-use blocks of code from a library of Code Snippets

• Search your Web page code to quickly update your Web site

• Clean up your code to make your pages easier to load

Anything that makes your business look good, and your Web site function smoothly, builds trust among your customers ”and that can directly benefit your bottom line. That applies not only to your Web site s public face, but to the underlying code that makes your site work smoothly and accurately process the orders placed online by your customers and business partners .

Back in the early days of the Web, practically anyone could write HTML (and they had to work with raw HTML, before the development of user -friendly software like FrontPage). These days, the code that makes Web pages attractive and interactive is increasingly complex. The prospect of creating code that is not only clean and functional, but that works the same from browser to browser, and from one operating system to another, can seem intimidating. That is, until you begin to use the FrontPage features that make code more accessible and easier to work with. Clean code makes pages easier to revise , which reduces production time. This chapter gives you some hands-on experience working with FrontPage s tools for viewing, editing, and cleaning up your Web page code ”features that not only enable you to write code faster and more efficiently , but also give you a jump-start on learning how to write HTML and XML correctly.

Lingo  

You probably know that HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language, the language originally used to mark up Web pages so their contents can appear correctly when displayed in a Web browser. You may be less familiar with XML or Extensible Markup Language. XML is another way of marking up Web pages that s not meant to replace HTML, but rather to complement it. In contrast to HTML, which contains a set of standard, well-defined tags for marking up text, images, and other contents, XML lets you create your own structured markup. By creating your own markup tags, you can focus on defining the way data is structured. XML is ideal for enabling database information to be exchanged between applications ”for instance, between a Web browser and a data source. See Chapter 16, Making a Site Database-Driven, for more information.