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Platform & Development Tools >> Development Tools >>

Code Tools

"For people who make websites" - A List Apart Magazine explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on web standards and best practices.
HTML Validator is a Mozilla extension that adds HTML validation inside Firefox and Mozilla. The number of errors of a HTML page is seen in the form of an icon in the status bar when browsing. The details of the errors are seen when looking the HTML source of the page.

The extension is based on Tidy and OpenSP. Both algorithms were originally developed by the Web Consortium W3C. Both algorithms are embedded inside Mozilla/Firefox and makes the validation locally on your machine, without sending HTML to a third party server.
This project aims to create an archive of user contributed clip art that can be freely used.
Starting at the beginning, this reference explains everything you need to know about using core JavaScript. It assumes you have the following basic background: a general understanding of the Internet and the World Wide Web and a good working knowledge of HTML. An excellent resource.
Edit your images on the fly online with Splashup, a web-based image editor that integrates with Flickr, Facebook, and Picasa. Splashup offers up a surprising array of image editing tools, far beyond the usual crop of resize and contrast-- you can also edit multiple images, play with filters and layers, use a variety of brushes, and more. Splashup is one of the best image editors in a long line of image editors; i.e., Picnik, Pixoh, and Resizr, to name just a few.[Lifehacker Annotation]
This website will let you:
  • Create an XML sitemap format that can be submitted to Google to help them crawl your website better.
  • Create a Text sitemap to submit to Yahoo.
  • Create a ROR sitemap, which is an independant XML format for any search engine.
  • Generate an HTML site map to allow human visitors to easily navigate on your site.
Clearspring's free Launchpad widget builder lets you easily turn your website's content into a widget which site visitors can use to place your content on all the major social media sites (MySpace, FaceBook, Google, hi5, Live, Yahoo, Wordpress, Blogger, etc.). The service also provides tracking and analysis.
This site features online text and html changing, modifying, converting tools designed to save you time making web pages or preparing text for web publication. If you've ever needed to capitalize sentences or convert line breaks to <p> or <br /> then this site can save you needless manual labor. There are other useful tools as well, like the one to uncompress html to make it readable and the ones to uppercase or lowercase text. Basically, the most common tasks that someone who works in an office or does freelance web development might encounter. Most of the tools have been created using javascript so you should be able to change large amounts of text as the processing is done on your computer instead of being limited by a server script.
Amaya is an open source Web editor endorsed by the W3C. Browsing features are seamlessly integrated with the editing and remote access features in a uniform environment. This follows the original vision of the Web as a space for collaboration and not just a one-way publishing medium.

Amaya started as an HTML + CSS style sheets editor. Since that time it was extended to support XML and an increasing number of XML applications such as the XHTML family, MathML, and SVG. It allows all those vocabularies to be edited simultaneously in compound documents.
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Code writing tools range greatly – from the standard Notepad that comes with Windows to complex platform emulation tools. And then there is a vast land of what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) tools which provide fancy graphical user interfaces and drag-and-drop features to ease creation of code.


Do-It-Yourself Editors

It may seem odd to many that a bunch of webmasters, myself included, prefer to code without the aid of a WYSISYG editor, but as they say, different strokes for different folks. Below are some reliable choices:


WYSIWYG Editors

WYSIWYG editors are the choice for most beginner to intermediate (and some advanced) webmasters. One major advantage of these editors are their ability to speed up your coding process by offering drag and drop features, form creation tools, shortcuts for common code needs and real-time viewing of what your code will look like. One thing to consider when using such an editor is whether it uses any kind of proprietary code snippets or techniques which might not play well in all standards-compliant browsers. This used to be a big problem with MS Frontpage, but I don't know if it still is. Anyway, since I don't use these editors, I can only list the ones I have heard are popular:

Nvu (pronounced N-view, for a "new view") bills itself as a complete Web Authoring System to rival programs like FrontPage and Dreamweaver. Open source.


PHP Editors



Simulated Platforms / Integrated Development Environments (IDEs)

I have never personally used an IDE so I can't actually recommend any of the tools below but they either look promising or I have heard of others using them successfully.


As for a simulated platform, again I can't speak from experience. Apparently, XAMPP fits the need by allowing you to create an Apache, PHP, MySQL and Perl environment on your personal computer. This could be especially useful if you prefer to code offline and upload only after you are satisfied with your work. For example, if you chose to build a site using Wordpress as the underlying CMS, you could install XAMPP and Wordpress on your PC to do all modifications locally. As for me, I find it easier to just create a test domain on a multi-domain hosting account and do my debug that way.



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