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51.1 Introducing the Tools
instructions that make the resulting le much larger and more complex than it needs to be.
(To see this for yourself, save a Word document as an HTML document and then look at
the result in a text editor such as Notepad!)
RTF (“rich text format”) documents are also unacceptable, as they still retain some
formatting information that is inappropriate for an HTML document. Any document that
contains “smart quotes” rather than "straight quotes" can also cause problems, because
smart quotes may not be displayed properly by browsers. (This is much less of a problem
on current browsers than it used to be.)
There are commercial Web development tools that allow you to create Web pages with-
out actually knowing anything about HTML or JavaScript. These applications are not
suitable for use with this book. The obvious reason is that the primary purpose of the book
is to show you how to write your own HTML documents and JavaScript code. Also, these
applications may create HTML les that are much larger and more complex than they need
to be for basic HTML documents. So, these applications are better suited for Web develop-
ment projects that involve a lot of graphics and the other “bells and whistles” that make
commercial Web pages attractive.
Creating an HTML/JavaScript document that works properly inevitably involves switch-
ing back and forth between a text editor and a browser—making changes and observing the
effects of those changes. Once you create a basic HTML document, you can open it in your
browser and move back and forth between this document and your text editor. Whenever you
change the document, you can reload or refresh it in your browser. It is certainly possible, but
not particularly convenient, to do this with a simple text editor such as Notepad.
There are many commercial software tools whose purpose is to facilitate writing and
editing HTML documents by integrating document creation, editing, and viewing. As
noted previously, some of them are intended for large and complicated projects and may
be “overkill” for use with this book. For several years, for creating this book and in my
own day-to-day work, I have used Visicom Media’s AceHTML Freeware V.5 (see www.
visicommedia.com). This software provides an HTML/JavaScript editor with some auto-
matic color-based text formatting that makes HTML instructions and JavaScript code
easier to read. There is an integrated browser, so it is easy to switch back and forth between
creating and editing a document and seeing the results of your work.
AceHTML also has a JavaScript syntax checker. As is typically the case, the checker
isn’t very good at telling you how to x a syntax error, but it at least tells you where the
error was detected. The freeware version of this editor may or may not be available cur-
rently, and it may require you to install other software that you may or may not want on
your computer. At the time this book was being published, freeware versions of AceHTML
were still available, as were versions available for purchase.
3
Although, in principle, it shouldn’t make any difference which browser you use, the
outputs displayed in this text come from either AceHTML’s internal browser or Mozilla’s
Firefox, which is the default browser on the author’s Windows computers. When you
3
Recent versions of AceHTML assume XHTML as the default language, rather than HTML. If
you use such a version with this book, you must override this assumption by saving files with
.htm or .html extensions.