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By Root 1394 0

development is a big job. You don’t go to a construction site without a belt full of tools (and a cool hat), and the same thing is true with Web development (except you don’t normally need a hard hat for Web development). An entire industry has evolved trying to sell tools that help make Web development easier. The funny thing is that the tools you need might not be the ones that people are trying to sell you. Some of the very best Web development tools are free, and some of the most expensive tools aren’t that helpful.

This chapter tells you what you need and how to set up your workshop with great programs that simplify Web development.

What’s Wrong with the Big Boys?

Many Web development books are really books about how to use a particular type of software. Microsoft’s FrontPage/Expression Web and Macromedia/Adobe Dreamweaver are the two primary applications in this category. These tools are powerful and offer some seemingly great features:

♦ WYSIWYG editing: What you see is what you get is an idea borrowed from word processors. You can create a Web page much like a word-processing document and use menus, as well as tools, to handle all the formatting. The theory is that you don’t have to know any icky codes.

♦ Templates: You can create a template that stays the same and build several pages from that template. If you need to change the template, everything else changes automatically.

♦ Site management: The interaction between the various pages on your site can be maintained automatically.

These sound like pretty good features, and they are. The tools (and the newer replacements, like Microsoft’s Expression suite) are very powerful and can be an important part of your Web development toolkit. However, the same powerful programs introduce problems, such as the following:

♦ Code maintenance: The commercial editors that concentrate on visual design tend to create pretty unmanageable code. If you find there’s something you need to change by hand, it’s pretty hard to fix the code.

♦ Vendor lock-in: These tools are written by corporations that want you to buy other tools from them. If you’re using Dreamweaver, you’ll find it easy to integrate with other Adobe applications (like ColdFusion), but it’s not as simple to connect to non-Adobe technology. Likewise, Microsoft’s offerings are designed to work best with other Microsoft technologies.

♦ Cost: The cost of these software packages keeps going up. Expression Web (Microsoft’s replacement for FrontPage) costs about $300, and Dreamweaver weighs in at $400. Both companies encourage you to buy the software as part of a package, which can easily cost more than $500.

♦ Complexity: They’re complicated. You can take a full class or buy a huge book on how to use only one of these technologies. If it’s that hard to figure out, is it really saving you any effort?

♦ Code: You still need to understand it. No matter how great your platform is, at some point, you have to dig into your code. After you plunk down all that money and spend all that time figuring out an application, you still have to understand how the underlying code works because things still go wrong. For example, if your page fails to work with Safari, you’ll have to find out why and fix the problem yourself.

♦ Spotty standards compliance: The tools are getting better here, but if you want your pages to comply with the latest standards, you have to edit them heavily after the tool is finished.

♦ Display variations: WYSIWYG is a lie. This is really the big problem. WYSIWYG works for word processors because it’s possible to make the screen look like the printed page. After a page is printed, it stays the same. You don’t know what a Web page will look like because that depends on the browser. What if the user loads your page on a cellphone or handheld device? The editors tend to perpetuate the myth that you can treat a Web page like a printed document when, in truth, it’s a very different kind of beast.

♦ Incompatibility with other tools: Web development is now moving toward