Tom Penney wrote:

>I've found myself writing a lot of html lately. I'm not doing anything
>too fancy, just stamping out a bunch of fairly simple pages. What are
>people using for writing web pages? I have not done a lot of this in the
>past. starting from scratch with a vim takes me forever and is not fun
>working with tables. Things like changing the background color in one
>row of a table is a pain. I downloaded bluefish, which is a nifty tool
>but still no graphical editing. Mozilla composer works great for tables
>but it messes up the formating of the file terribly. It changes things
>automatically that I don't want changed.  
>
>I've been starting by first laying out my tables and stuff with the
>mozilla composer then doing everything else in vi. any suggestions?
>
>  
>
I highly recommend learning Regular Expresions.  I was getting pretty 
good with vim with web development, but like you said, sometimes working 
with tables by hand takes forever.  But now that I know Regular 
Expresions, I see tables for what they are, patterns.  And HTML is 
extremely "RegEx frendly", the whole language is nothing but patterns of 
tags.  For a real quick example, it only takes one command in vim to 
right align all the cells with numeric data in them 
(:s/<td>\(\d\+\)<\/td>/<td align=right>\1<\/td>/g).  If you're going to 
be making large changes with HTML, or other simalar files (XML is even 
easier yet), a good grasp on Regular Expresions is a HUGE help.

I've used UltraEdit and Visual Interdev on Windows, and I droped them 
both for vim through Putty.  And I agree with the wysisyg editors, they 
tend to do their own thing and format stuff their own way, but it 
usually ends with some really horid code.  After correcting another 
developer's form made with some insane wysiwyg editor, (I managed to 
trim enough blank <td>s and repeated <font> tags to go from 389K of HTML 
to less than 60K) I refuse to use another wysiwyg editor until I see one 
that does HTML correctly and without bogus formating everywhere.

Just my $.02 (and bad spelling)
Chris Frederick



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