What software do I need?

[Mary Ellen Curtin]

arrgh. Because I can't afford a new system right now, I'm running a
hamster-powered Pentium 166, 64 M RAM, Win 95. I've been using
Dreamweaver3, but I've now reached my limit. *rends DW3 with teeth
& claws*

Why have I stuck with DW this long?

- good website management -- I have 6 or 7 so far, and DW is handy
for integrating site management and design
- templates I build and modify myself -- though DW is being so
intractable at allowing me to use CSS, and DW3 renders it so badly,
that it's become basically unusable.

Does anyone have any suggestions that would work on my radically
underpowered system?

Mary Ellen
Doctor Science, MA

[Vladdy]

Re: What software do I need?

"Mary Ellen Curtin" <mecurtin@NOalu mni.SPAMprincet on.HEREedu> wrote in
message news:XFAWa.918$ Q81.84600968@ne ws.netcarrier.n et...
| arrgh. Because I can't afford a new system right now, I'm running a
| hamster-powered Pentium 166, 64 M RAM, Win 95. I've been using
| Dreamweaver3, but I've now reached my limit. *rends DW3 with teeth
| & claws*
|
| Why have I stuck with DW this long?
|
| - good website management -- I have 6 or 7 so far, and DW is handy
| for integrating site management and design
| - templates I build and modify myself -- though DW is being so
| intractable at allowing me to use CSS, and DW3 renders it so badly,
| that it's become basically unusable.
|
| Does anyone have any suggestions that would work on my radically
| underpowered system?
|
| Mary Ellen
| Doctor Science, MA
|
Notepad (or better HTML oriented text editor) will do a better job than any
DW FP or other bloated WYSI!WYG editor

-Vladdy

[Mary Ellen Curtin]

Re: What software do I need?

Vladdy wrote:[color=blue]
> Notepad (or better HTML oriented text editor) will do a better job[/color]
than any[color=blue]
> DW FP or other bloated WYSI!WYG editor[/color]

I'm prepared to believe you, and in fact I've been doing all my CSS
work in Notepad. But I really need the ability to set up templates such
that changing the template changes all its dependent pages. I see no
need for WYSIWYG, I just want templating and site management
features.

Any specific suggestions?

Mary Ellen
Doctor Science, MA

[Darin McGrew]

Re: What software do I need?

Mary Ellen Curtin <mecurtin@NOalu mni.SPAMprincet on.HEREedu> wrote:[color=blue]
> I'm prepared to believe you, and in fact I've been doing all my CSS
> work in Notepad. But I really need the ability to set up templates such
> that changing the template changes all its dependent pages. I see no
> need for WYSIWYG, I just want templating and site management
> features.
>
> Any specific suggestions?[/color]

I've used HTML preprocessors for that for years. I use makefiles to
automate the process of generating HTML from preprocessor source, and this
includes validation. There's a list of HTML preprocessors here:

http://www.htmlhelp.com/links/preprocessors.html

I've used Orb and the iMatix version of HTMLPP, but I've heard good things
about some of the others, too.
--
Darin McGrew, mcgrew@stanford alumni.org, http://www.rahul.net/mcgrew/
Web Design Group, darin@htmlhelp. com, http://www.HTMLHelp.com/

invent /in-'vent/ v. to acquire ownership of in exchange for payment

[Diane Wilson]

Re: What software do I need?

In article <SNBWa.1202$Wt. 1014@nwrdny03.g nilink.net>,
vladimir.g.kryl ov@verizon.net says...[color=blue]
> "Mary Ellen Curtin" <mecurtin@NOalu mni.SPAMprincet on.HEREedu> wrote in
> message news:XFAWa.918$ Q81.84600968@ne ws.netcarrier.n et...
> | arrgh. Because I can't afford a new system right now, I'm running a
> | hamster-powered Pentium 166, 64 M RAM, Win 95. I've been using
> | Dreamweaver3, but I've now reached my limit. *rends DW3 with teeth
> | & claws*
> |
> | Why have I stuck with DW this long?
> |
> | - good website management -- I have 6 or 7 so far, and DW is handy
> | for integrating site management and design
> | - templates I build and modify myself -- though DW is being so
> | intractable at allowing me to use CSS, and DW3 renders it so badly,
> | that it's become basically unusable.
> |
> | Does anyone have any suggestions that would work on my radically
> | underpowered system?
> |
> | Mary Ellen
> | Doctor Science, MA
> |
> Notepad (or better HTML oriented text editor) will do a better job than any
> DW FP or other bloated WYSI!WYG editor[/color]

What site management tools and template management does Notepad have?

For Mary Ellen, I find that GoLive does a far better job with general
CSS support, but neither GoLive nor DW (current releases) do a good
job of displaying CSS boxes in layout mode. Hoping for better in
new release of both that are expected this year.

GoLive is a memory hog, though, and a number of current tools don't
support Win95 any more. GoLive didn't support templates until
version 6 (current version), although version 5 had better
reusable component support than DW had at the time (which doesn't
help for transitioning an existing site, I know).

If you can't afford a new system, you might ask around to see if
you can at least find another 64mb of memory, or other upgrades from
used parts. A lot of people have spare parts that would make good
upgrades for your system.

Diane

[Rev. Bob 'Bob' Crispen]

Re: What software do I need?

The voices predicted that "Mary Ellen Curtin"
<mecurtin@NOalu mni.SPAMprincet on.HEREedu> would say on 01 Aug 2003:
[color=blue]
> arrgh. Because I can't afford a new system right now, I'm running a
> hamster-powered Pentium 166, 64 M RAM, Win 95. I've been using
> Dreamweaver3, but I've now reached my limit. *rends DW3 with teeth
> & claws*[/color]

I know the feeling. Millions of tiny little whack-a-mole windows that
do *approximately* what you want, if you remember which one does it.
Allegedly the newer Dreamweaver is tighter, but I haven't broken down
and spent the money yet.

On this pathetic 200 MHz Pentium laptop I'm running Amaya
<http://w3.org/> as a basic web page editor (for XHTML) and TopStyle
Pro for CSS. At work, where we don't have a license for TopStyle, I
use Amaya and HTMLTidy. I played with Amaya before, and it felt
bloated and like it was always just on the verge of breaking. The
current version (July 10, istr) feels light, fast, and well put
together, and the only qualm I have about recommending it is that you
don't want to get it anywhere near floats. If you don't do a lot of
floats, it'll do you just fine.
[color=blue]
> Why have I stuck with DW this long?
>
> - good website management -- I have 6 or 7 so far, and DW is handy
> for integrating site management and design[/color]

Learn Microsoft FTP (C:\Windows\ftp .exe). The only commands you have
to learn are open, cd, lcd, ascii, binary, put, get, prompt, mput,
mget, and bye. They're probably the only commands that work on
Microsoft FTP anyway ;-) I've got a GUI-based Explorer-like FTP
program, but half the time it hangs halfway through.

As far as actual site management is concerned, I've been duplicating
directory trees from my home machine to my web hosts, one directory
head per host. For virtual hosts, I just duplicate directories or
soft link them so that "/images/foo.png" has the image no matter how
you got there. I'd claim that I only use sensible relative
addressing, but in fact, I *wish* I only did sensible relative
addressing, and I'm *still* cleaning out relative links from the last
time I spun off a virtual host. If you want to see the directory tree
for my big site, it's at <http://www.crispen.org/etc/sitemap.html>. I
don't know why you would. Please don't look at my code!

But basically my site organization and management are written on the
back of a napkin. I tell myself that I don't need site management
because I've got such a logical mind, but the truth is that I'm so
confused that I'm beyond any help site management features could give
me.

And, speaking seriously for a minute, I was burned by Symantec's
Visual Page (remember that?), which had a particularly ugly site
management system that stuck huge files full of useless garbage out on
your website, had the slowest FTP program in existence, and would
crash and require lengthy regeneration if you looked at it funny. So
I'm kinda leery about turning the management of my site over to some
whiz kid programmer I've never met.

For my active server stuff I can run Apache, PHP and MySQL on this
wretched little laptop. I'm serious as a heart attack! When I was
using PHPMyAdmin to fiddle with a table with 30,000 rows on this evil
little machine, it took approximately the age of the universe, but it
did it! I've got some notes about setting up phpdev on
<http://www.crispen.org/src/our_computer.ht ml> if you want to do that.
[color=blue]
> - templates I build and modify myself -- though DW is being so
> intractable at allowing me to use CSS, and DW3 renders it so badly,
> that it's become basically unusable.
>
> Does anyone have any suggestions that would work on my radically
> underpowered system?[/color]

Obviously TopStyle Pro (US$79) will handle your stylesheets like a
dream. But if you've got the patience to edit them by hand (e.g.,
with vim or notepad or Amaya's HTML editor and with a copy of the CSS
2 spec right on your desk), you can get by with just Amaya and
HTMLTidy.

I think TopStyle Pro has some site management doodads as well, so that
might push you over into spending the $80. Lots of folks on this
newsgroup use it, so they can tell you if it's any good for that.
--
Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen
bob at crispen dot org

There's plenty of room for all of God's creatures.
Right next to the mashed potatoes.
- Billboard for the Saskatoon Restaurant

[Fox]

Re: What software do I need?

http://crimsoneditor.com

Mary Ellen Curtin wrote:[color=blue]
>
> arrgh. Because I can't afford a new system right now, I'm running a
> hamster-powered Pentium 166, 64 M RAM, Win 95. I've been using
> Dreamweaver3, but I've now reached my limit. *rends DW3 with teeth
> & claws*
>
> Why have I stuck with DW this long?
>
> - good website management -- I have 6 or 7 so far, and DW is handy
> for integrating site management and design
> - templates I build and modify myself -- though DW is being so
> intractable at allowing me to use CSS, and DW3 renders it so badly,
> that it's become basically unusable.
>
> Does anyone have any suggestions that would work on my radically
> underpowered system?
>
> Mary Ellen
> Doctor Science, MA[/color]

[Henri Sivonen]

Re: What software do I need?

In article <MPG.1994cba545 5df9639896cd@ne ws.newsguy.com> ,
Diane Wilson <diane@firelily .com> wrote:
[color=blue]
> For Mary Ellen, I find that GoLive does a far better job with general
> CSS support, but neither GoLive nor DW (current releases) do a good
> job of displaying CSS boxes in layout mode.[/color]

GoLive 5 sprinkled bogus tags (IIRC <CSACTION>) in the HTML source in
order enable round tripping of some scripting features. It encouraged
the use of pixel-measured table layouts. Also, the JavaScript libraries
were incompatible with Gecko (Opera and KHTML, too?).

Have these problems been fixed in GoLive 6?

I haven't compared Dreamweaver MX and GoLive 6, but I found Dreamweaver
4.01 significantly better than GoLive 5.

--
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi

http://www.iki.fi/hsivonen/

Mozilla Web Author FAQ: http://mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/faq.html

[Shawn K. Quinn]

Re: What software do I need?

[crossposted and followups set to c.i.w.a.tools]

Mary Ellen Curtin wrote:
[color=blue]
> arrgh. Because I can't afford a new system right now, I'm running a
> hamster-powered Pentium 166, 64 M RAM, Win 95. I've been using
> Dreamweaver3, but I've now reached my limit. *rends DW3 with teeth
> & claws*
>
> Why have I stuck with DW this long?
>
> - good website management -- I have 6 or 7 so far, and DW is handy
> for integrating site management and design
> - templates I build and modify myself -- though DW is being so
> intractable at allowing me to use CSS, and DW3 renders it so badly,
> that it's become basically unusable.
>
> Does anyone have any suggestions that would work on my radically
> underpowered system?[/color]

If you have to keep Windows 95, you're almost certainly SOL.

If you're willing to ditch Windows 95 for something else (a distribution of
GNU/Linux, or possibly even FreeBSD) then you might have better luck trying
out something like Quanta, Bluefish, or even Emacs with appropriate modes
added on. The worst thing I've noticed about the first two choices, is that
they seem to be quite stuck in the HTML 3.2 era, so you have to be careful
(or just delete the shortcuts to tags which don't exist in HTML 4.01 Strict
and later). Quanta appears to have something resembling site management
functions within it.

I personally use Emacs with heavily modified versions of html-helper-mode
and css-mode, but I am not sure who else I would realistically recommend
this setup to as it has taken me several months to finally get used to some
of the quirks. I have not had any real need for integrated site management
functionality so I would not know how to implement this under Emacs.

--
Shawn K. Quinn

[Andreas Paasch]

Re: What software do I need?

Mary Ellen Curtin wrote:
[color=blue]
> arrgh. Because I can't afford a new system right now, I'm running a
> hamster-powered Pentium 166, 64 M RAM, Win 95. I've been using
> Dreamweaver3, but I've now reached my limit. *rends DW3 with teeth
> & claws*
>
> Why have I stuck with DW this long?
>
> - good website management -- I have 6 or 7 so far, and DW is handy
> for integrating site management and design
> - templates I build and modify myself -- though DW is being so
> intractable at allowing me to use CSS, and DW3 renders it so badly,
> that it's become basically unusable.
>
> Does anyone have any suggestions that would work on my radically
> underpowered system?
>
> Mary Ellen
> Doctor Science, MA[/color]

Just for the record, like Shawn Quinn recommended, I would switch to linux
and get the last out of the machine.
I had a similar one standing here - unfortunately it died and I don't know
why, just won't start again.
But, instead of loading win98 onto it, I chose Mandrake Linux 7.2 to run on
it and it went really smooth. Ok, I had 128 MB Ram in it, but that isn't
the biggest difference.

/Andreas
--
Registeret Linux user #292411

[Diane Wilson]

Re: What software do I need?

In article <hsivonen-72D678.09532203 082003@news.jip pii.fi>, hsivonen@iki.fi
says...[color=blue]
> In article <MPG.1994cba545 5df9639896cd@ne ws.newsguy.com> ,
> Diane Wilson <diane@firelily .com> wrote:
>[color=green]
> > For Mary Ellen, I find that GoLive does a far better job with general
> > CSS support, but neither GoLive nor DW (current releases) do a good
> > job of displaying CSS boxes in layout mode.[/color]
>
> GoLive 5 sprinkled bogus tags (IIRC <CSACTION>) in the HTML source in
> order enable round tripping of some scripting features.[/color]

GoLive uses private tags for some reusable components that are managed
by the program. Browsers can, and do, ignore them.
[color=blue]
> It encouraged
> the use of pixel-measured table layouts. Also, the JavaScript libraries
> were incompatible with Gecko (Opera and KHTML, too?).[/color]

It doesn't "encourage" pixel-based layout any more or less than
Dreamweaver.

I assume that Adobe does work at JavaScript compatibility. I haven't
had problems with it, for the limited JavaScript that I use.
[color=blue]
> Have these problems been fixed in GoLive 6?
>
> I haven't compared Dreamweaver MX and GoLive 6, but I found Dreamweaver
> 4.01 significantly better than GoLive 5.[/color]

"Better" depends on what you want to do. GoLive 5 was better for CSS
editing and management than Dreamweaver 3, 4, or MX. GoLive's
site management is better. Dreamweaver does have a reputation
of being better with JavaScript, but that's not a feature that
I use much in either program.