"HTML-Kit is a full-featured, highly customizable and free development environment that can be used to create, edit, validate, preview and publish web pages and scripts."
After downloading HTML-Kit (which was fairly quick), the first thing I did was open a new document. I noticed that
the file opened with some of the HTML code already in place (head, title, body). At the top of the window was a set
of tabs that opened various toolbars (tools, batch operations, objects, document, style, text, tables, forms, navigate,
online & favorites) with many buttons on each. At first I found this to be a bit intimidating and confusing, and it
looks very cluttered and seems hard to locate the buttons that you are looking for. However, once I began trying things
out I had a much better feeling about using HTML-Kit. I still don’t know what many of the tools are and how they are used
(such as PHP code block to name just one), but
after getting familiarized and learning more I think many of them will probably become helpful. This is
why a helpful and easy to navigate support website is necessary.
I choose the tab titled “document” and began typing and clicking on the various icons to see what would happen,
and I found some very helpful features. By doing this I was able to quickly insert a link, headings, title, center
the text, and insert comments.
All you have to do is highlight the text that you want to put a tag around and click the option button. Also, if you type “<” a large list of command
options opens and you can just click on one to insert it. Each of these command functions is described, and while it
does take some time to examine all the features it seems like this would be a good way for a person with basic
knowledge to learn more about HTML coding. The same is true for CSS. This looks like an excellent way to create
CSS, but if you don’t know anything about them you probably wouldn’t know where to begin. A nice function is
the HTML code tidy - you can use this to find errors in your HTML code and I think this would be helpful for just
about anyone. I tried it with this page and it showed
0 errors, but 65 warnings! Something else I noticed is that it saves as .htm rather than .html, and I found myself
renaming my practice document.
Overall I think this editor seems great and would recommend it. I just think it would be helpful to have some
knowledge of HTML coding so you don’t get too confused, and I also think it’s important to allow yourself enough
time to examine the many, many options. The website provides a support forum which I didn’t really look at
since all the questions seemed to be about specific individual needs, but I did look at the tutorials
(which are also available in languages other than English). While helpful in some ways, a lot of the
info provided wasn’t for absolute beginners. The website also offers a large number of plugins where you can
pick and choose additional features and updates, but again I wasn't sure what most of them were and wasn't sure if I would
need them or not.
Reviewing a Shareware or Freeware HTML Editor
