HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide, 6th Edition

Writing Tools

Use any text editor to create an HTML or XHTML document, as long as it can save your work on a disk in text file format. That’s because even though web documents include elaborate text layout and pictures, they’re all just plain old text documents themselves. A fancier WYSIWYG editor or a translator for your favorite word processor is fine, too—although it may not support all the language features we discuss in this book. You’ll probably end up touching up the source text they produce, in any case, and don’t expect layout results like what you’d get with a page-layout application.

While it’s not needed to compose documents, you should have at least one version of a popular browser installed on your computer to view your work. That’s because, unless you use a special editor, the source document you compose won’t look anything like what gets displayed by a browser, even though it’s the same document. Make sure what your readers actually see is what you intended by viewing the document yourself with a browser. Besides, the popular ones are free over the Internet. We currently recommend Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Netscape Navigator, and Opera Software ASA.

Also note that you don’t need a connection to the Internet or the Web to write and view your HTML or XHTML documents. You can compose and view your documents stored on a hard drive or floppy disk that’s attached to your computer. You can even navigate among your local documents with ...