I'm contemplating switching from Windows (long time user) to a
Macintosh (a system I know virtually nothing about), so I am
looking for equivalent (or better) programs for some tasks.
I do a little hobby web site (380 pages - maybe it expanded more
than I thought) using The Semware Editor (an old DOS editor) with
some HTML color coding add-ons, and CSE HTML validator to catch
typos, backed by validator.w3.org (when I remember).
At the moment it is all hand written in HTML 4.01 Strict pretty
much, with very plain HTML markup (a lot of it legacy stuff from
long ago) and a CSS file in each directory to give some visual
differences to each different topic area on the site. No
scripting at all. Only about a dozen pages with inappropriate
tables (I'll fix them next major rewrite). I also figure some of
my viewers are browsing with small screen PDAs or even mobile
phones, so I try to have everything that depends on CSS fail
gracefully.
Does anyone have any special favourites for Mac OS X HTML editor,
offline HTML and/or CSS validator, link checkers, or anything
else that might make clean web page generation easier for an
amateur?
This potential move also seemed an appropriate time to consider
moving some aspects of my site to database driven generation of
the web pages. This would only be for some of the pages. Lists
of boat trips, lists of programs, that sort of stuff, maybe
20-30% of the total pages, but harder to keep track of changes
because some items appear on multiple pages (and could be better
served by being on additional pages).
I was thinking offline generation of my pages on my local
machine, followed by uploading changed pages to the commercial
web server I use say once a week. I don't think I want to get
into generating pages on the fly on the server.
However in this area there seems a lot of almost conflicting
potential ways of doing the pages. Some of the texts I've seen
seem to indicate you should generate your material in XML, and
then convert into HTML. While I sort of like the idea of XML,
the books I've seen make this sound pretty complicated for a
hobby situation. Nor did it seem really clear which tools to
look for. To be honest, having looked at a couple of O'Reilly
books on XML, I'm not sure it is appropriate to a hobby user.
The other way seems to be to gather my raw information in a
database (for various reasons, some of it is most easily
collected and updated on a PDA while wandering around, so it
would probably end up as a CSV file). Then use scripts on some
sort of text extraction tool (Awk, Perl, PHP, Rebol, Rexx?) to
generate appropriate web pages. I know I'll have a bit of a
fight with whatever scripting language I choose, but once I get
one type of web page extracted, it will be a lot easier to write
other scripts for all the other web pages.
Has anyone any suggestions about approaches? Is there anything
particularly appropriate to OS X that I have ignored? It seems
to me that there would be many people in a similar situation, and
therefore there is probably some absolutely great, ready to use
tool out there, and I've just searched badly so far.
--
Eric Lindsay http://www.ericlindsay.com/airlie
Airlie Beach Qld Australia - Great Barrier Reef entry
Psion & Epoc site http://www.ericlindsay.com/epoc
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