This is a kind of survey of some authoring tools to see how they do fundamental things when editing code. It is important for reviewing HTML 5 specification which in its design principles has "Paving the Cowpath". It means that the specification should follow what is done in software on the Web and what is commonly found in Web documents.
Category: hand coded authoring tool with macros and scripts. Some drag and drop features for images for example. It is highly configurable and modifiable through scripting. I have tested Textmate (Macromates) Version 1.5.6 (1405).
Configurable with scripting
When saving for the first time the Template, the proposed extension is always .html, even if the document is xhtml.
The template gives by fault the English language. There is no way to set the user preferences. There is no warning saying that it should be changed to the appropriate language.
The title is set to untitled by fault, which might lead to document without proper title.
The default encoding for files is UTF-8. It adds the meta http-equiv information for HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0, but xml PI for XHTML 1.1
When doing a drag and drop of an image file “big-forest.jpg” on the editing window, the following markup is generated: it works also with non us-ascii characters. The generated markup is always html (no trailing slash) even if the template is xhtml.
<img src="big-forest.jpg" width="550" height="395" alt="Big Forest">
<img src="大森.jpg" width="550" height="395" alt="大森">
The command to create an anchor when selecting text, takes the URI which is inside the buffer and add it with a title coming from the document itself online (taking the first occurrence of title elements). It escapes the URI for characters like &
Documentation for elements is taken from HTML 4.01, requesting online the name of the elements each time. A local cached copy would be better.
Validation is done by calling the HTML validator online Fixing syntax is done by calling Tidy locally
It proposes “New From Templates…” with 7 choices. There is the possibility to create your own templates.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
<title>untitled</title>
<meta name="generator" content="TextMate http://macromates.com/">
<meta name="author" content="Karl Dubost">
<!-- Date: 2007-07-20 -->
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>
<title>untitled</title>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">
<head>
<title>untitled</title>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
Category: Wysiwyg and hand-coding authoring tool. I have tested Adobe Golive Version 8.0.1.
Configurable with visual menu
When saving for the first time the Template, the proposed extension is always .html, even if the document is xhtml.
no lang information is set on the document when the template is created. I haven’t found any way to add the information from the menu except typing it manually.
When not set, Golive warns that the page will be saved with Untitled Page and proposes to change the title.
When creating a document, it is possible to choose between utf-16, utf-8 (default), iso-8859-1, shift_js. It is possible to add other charset in the preferences. When opening a document, the scanning limit to find charset info is set at 1024 characters, but this can be modified. If no charset information is found, it will be either asked to the user, set to default encoding, or the page will be converted depending on the preferences.
Complex. You have to be in wysiwyg mode to be able to edit the image and then go through a series of menu and selecting the files. Drag and drop available only in wysiwyg mode. The markup generated is
<img src="%e5%a4%a7%e6%a3%ae.jpg" alt="" height="395" width="550" border="0" />
The markup created for a new link is
<a href="(EmptyReference!)"></a>
There is an inspector to navigate and call the right file. Drap and drop works in wysiwyg mode.
A pop-up window which is a browser of the HTML 4.01 specification.
There is a tool to convert a document to XHTML. It converts the document to XHTML 1.0 Transitional. There is a dynamic syntax checking showing the mistake when they are typed. The tool has a dynamic editing feature which is contextual depending on the elements we are on, proposing possible values for attributes too, but it is not doctype contextual. For example, on html in XHTML 1.1, it will propose lang attribute, even if at the same time the dynamic syntax checker says that it is not allowed. There is a outline mode which knows the right elements and attributes depending on the DTD.
When starting the software we can start with a “New Document”. A series of choices is proposed. Among them, you can select Web or Mobile. A lot of templates are proposed: simple page, predefined layout (CSS, Table, blogs), framesets. For each of them, you can choose between HTML and XHTML, which leads then to choices.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8">
<meta name="generator" content="Adobe GoLive">
<title>Untitled Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<p></p>
</body>
</html>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
<meta name="generator" content="Adobe GoLive" />
<title>Untitled Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<p></p>
</body>
</html>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
<meta name="generator" content="Adobe GoLive" />
<title>Untitled Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<p></p>
</body>
</html>