November 18, 2002

How to produce web pages

We are not really web programmers at FEREGO but we play and experiment with various technologies for producing web pages. We have experimented with things like CSS stylesheets, JavaScript, and xslt technologies. The internet has changed so fast that hardly anyone can keep up. One of the things we attempt to do is to keep up with a wide array of technologies relating to web pages. It is possible that FEREGO may attempt to produce its own solution and to offer such solutions for sale.

For one and all

Word processors have improved so much that one can now produce very nice pages by pretty much using your favorite editor. Microsoft Word does very nice web pages, and for less money (shall we say free) on Unix Sun's Star Office is superb. These editors make HTML coding as easy as a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) editor. FEREGO has used both Word and Star for doing web pages and each of these is very enjoyable and makes creating of nice pages effortless. Tables, images, and other complex things like that are also really easy. Netscape's Composer is also another comfortable HTML editor that produces excellent web pages. In the "good" old internet days (around 1997) these things were pretty hard but now these decent editors make the job nearly effortless.

There is also a large suite of free word processors that are capable of creating HTML. For example, on Linux there are editors such as KWord.

Raw HTML

The fastest way of getting a new web pages seems to be to cut and paste from the last page. Having an empty document with the HTML tags at the top and the bottom also helps. This can be bookmarked in emacs and then sucked in as needed. That's currently what we are doing here. It's a problem of course if you absolutely must change something on every web page because this involves editing every page.

If you need to change the formatting on lots of pages, say hundreds, then some kind of automation technique will be needed. Mashed Potatoes magazine specifically discusses automation aspects regarding web pages, and there may be some future articles on this. This is a big subject by the way and we can't even begin to scratch the surface.

We could say a lot (and eventually will say a lot) about various web technologies we have played around with. Most of these things have been done as research and learning and not for commercial use. In future short notes we will try to give mention of some technologies we have tried including some of our attempted inventions.

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