Should Your HTML and PHP Freeware Editor Do More Than HTML?

Author: Ian McAllister

What kind of html and php freeware editor should you choose? A wysiwyg editor is so easy to use, but it means that you never learn what is going on behind the scenes. When you want to do something unusual, or your editor makes a mistake, you don't know how to fix it.

The alternative is to use an html text editor that will take shortcuts under your control, and can even be programmed to suit you.

Click here to join my free membership list. One of the videos available to members will let you look over my shoulder for half an hour as I use some of the shortcuts in Arachnophilia to make life easier and save time.

Shun Microsoft Editors

Front Page and even MS Word can be used as free web page editors, with built in spell checkers. There are a couple of traps however.

Microsoft inserts special characters that ruin your web page. For instance you're would come out as you?re. If you know how, you can tell Word not to use special characters.
They are designed to produce code that prevents some pages being viewed by competitor's browsers, so that visitors can't use Firefox or Opera. You can lose a lot of money that way, and you don't know that your web editor is playing you false unless someone tells you, or you happen to use a browser that doesn't show your web pages.
Code created by Word uses about four times as many characters as you need, which can make the pages you upload to your site very long.

An Excellent Free HTML Editor

Your website editor doesn't have to be inferior just because it is open source.

Arachnophilia means "love of spiders" and seems quite a good name for software to edit world wide web pages.

Does it work with your operating system? Probably. To make it universal, it has been programmed in Java, which you can download for free from Sun. Because all the common operating systems will accept Java, you can run Arachnophilia there.

Can't Arachnophilia do more than just HTML editors?

It can indeed! Here are some of the other tasks it can handle.

java editor
javascript editor
perl
C
C++
GGI
XML
PHP editor
RTF
SQL database editor

It can handle more kinds of file, but I've never heard of them, so they are probably of no interest to beginners.

You don't really need a php web editor as a beginner, but after you have tested your files as html, you should upload them as .php files. That way when you want to use a php web design editor some time in the future, you won't have to try and persuade your site to treat html files as php files. It will make no difference at this stage.

As I keep saying, you don't need special website software, but it sure helps! You can do all your html coding in a simple text editor such as Notepad. But it is so much easier to use a powerful html and php freeware editor such as Arachnophilia.