Easy Web Design: Using Netscape Composer 7.2 or Sea Monkey Composer
- Length: 57 pages
- Edition: 1
- Language: English
- Publication Date: 2020-12-04
- ISBN-10: B08PST33X8
WHY SEAMONKEY?
SeaMonkey Composer is a powerful web page editor. It allows you to easily create web pages, and it allows you to easily switch between different modes of editing as your needs advance. If you never want to see any HTML tags, you can edit all of your pages in Preview. If you want to occasionally switch to seeing only your HTML tags, you can quickly switch to HTML Source or to HTML Tag view, make your change, and then return to the familiar Preview or Edit views.
It is also free. You can download it from http://www.seamonkey-project.org/. You’ll probably want a fast connection.
This tutorial is designed around Netscape Composer; I have not yet updated it for SeaMonkey. However, a cursory look indicates that the software hasn’t changed much. The screenshots that I had to recreate because I couldn’t find the old ones are almost the same, and the basic concepts should be similar in any web page editor.
You can always switch from one good web editor to another good editor. Almost all web page editors (and all good web page editors) use HTML, or HyperText Markup Language. This means that you can use one web page editor now and later decide to switch to another editor without losing any work. It’s all HTML, and they can all read each other’s work.
Why Not Netscape?
Netscape has come a long way, but it still has some problems that might make it less useful for you.
Line Break Love Affair: Netscape’s love affair with the line break is somewhat annoying if you don’t edit your HTML directly, and very annoying if you do. The default unit of sentences in a web page should be paragraphs, but Netscape appears stuck in a seventies line-editing time-warp. When you press return on your keyboard, you don’t get a new paragraph, you just break the line in the current set of text. What looks like a paragraph to you does not look like a paragraph to web browsers or other automated web page tools. Even when you switch a line to a paragraph using the style menu, the line break remains stuck on the end of your paragraph like a useless appendix.
In SeaMonkey, you may be able to fix this by checking “Return in a paragraph always creates a new paragraph”.
Insecure File Uploads: Netscape does not support secure file uploads. It uses the old FTP instead of secure FTP or secure copy. This means that every time you upload a file to your web site, your password is sent over the net in plain text.
Dynamic Web Code: Netscape throws out certain kinds of dynamic web code. If you use PHP or ASP, for example, Netscape completely throws out the dynamic portions of your web site.
Indentation: Netscape does not support any automatic indentation tools. You probably don’t care about this if you don’t edit HTML, but if you do edit your HTML directly, this makes it difficult to maintain readable HTML. All you can use for indentation are spaces, and you need to indent every single line individually……….