A lot of web authoring tools are on the market that we can't introduce in this book. The most tools are more a less user friendly HTML WYSIWYG editors with some powerful functions to design some web pages. Some tools also offer the management of whole web sites including the function to apply new design templates to all files.
We have got the impression that most tools shall produce very well looking web pages with high sophisticated features that most mobile browsers don't support. Especially, if you want to choose the formal grammar i.e. the DTD of a markup language like HTML 4.01 Strict or XHTML Basic you won't find such a feature in most editors. In order to be able to write well fitting pages for mobile browsers, a web editor should at least support the selection of a DTD.
Some web editors like FrontPage 2000 don't care about a DTD. It is more or less impossible to easily control the set of appropriate HTML elements. On the other hand, FrontPage 2000 doesn't support neither XHTML nor XHTML Basic. If an XHTML file is opened, FrontPage shifts the XML declaration and the document type definition into the page's body.
It is almost impossible, to test and compare all web editors that are on the market. We have picked out only a few editors before we have started to write this book. The following list summarizes some editors' major features and is very incomplete.
1st Page 2000 v2.00 Free by Evrsoft
Corel WordPerfect 9 Service Pack 3
SGML and XML DTD can be added, even if some XML DTD need manual adjustments
The file extensions "html" and "xml" are fixed to SGML and XML files, respectively. A file with the extension "html" can only be saved as an SGML file, even if it is an XHTML file. An XHTML file can only be saved with the extension "xml".
An XML file can only be saved in three character encodings: "XML UTF-16 Big Endian", "XML UTF-16 Little Endian" or "XML UTF-8"
FrontPage 2000 by Microsoft
HTML-Kit Version 1.0 Build 290
Built-in support for HTML 4.0 and 4.01 Transitional, Strict and Frameset
Built-in HTML Tidy to validate and reformat HTML and XHTML documents
Macromedia Dreamweaver
Copyright © 2001-2003 by Rainer Hillebrand and Thomas Wierlemann