What Is Web Page Authoring Software?
With the World Wide Web's explosion of popularity, millions of individuals and businesses around the globe have tried their hand at publishing their own website. While the hypertext markup language (HTML) is easy to learn, its necessary learning curve adds time to the web development process. Web authoring software removes this learning curve and allows users to quickly and easily publish on the Web.
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Function
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From a user's perspective, web authoring software works much like word processing or graphical design software; users simply type text, drag and position images and insert additional features where they want them to appear on the finished web product. As the user designs the page, though, specialized code quietly translates the text properties, image location and other critical components of the page into web-friendly HTML. When the user finishes designing the page, he simply saves it much like he would any other document, and the software stores the page as a Web-ready .html or .htm file.
Features
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The primary feature of Web authoring software, of course, is its ability to quickly and easily create HTML files without the need for HTML programming knowledge. In addition, some web authoring packages use built-in file transfer protocol (FTP) capabilities to publish the designed pages to a web server and allow the user to edit publish files while making real-time changes. Web authoring software also allows users to create cascading style sheets (CSS) and web design templates, create and add specialized scripts (including Javascript applications) and even automatically afix file properties like create date, author information, and copyright data.
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Benefits
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Web authoring software is beneficial to web designers because it allows them to efficiently design web pages using a graphical user interface (GUI). Because of the graphical nature of the software, designers can also see how their pages, sites and projects look as they're being designed, eliminating the need for users to constantly publish and review their work. Using special features of the software, developers can also instantly publish their work directly from the Web authoring software and add advanced features like roll-over images, javascript code and "layered" designs.
Considerations
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Some users feel that web authoring software is detrimental to a designer's HTML programming skills, as users rarely need to actually apply those skills to their design projects. Instead, web authoring software users simply design web pages much like they would design a word processing or desktop publishing document, dragging items into the desired location instead of using HTML commands to properly position the image. For this reason, seasoned web design professionals insist on designing their pages and sites exclusively in text-based HTML, some using simple word processing applications, rather than building a reliance on a graphical interface.
Effects
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Despite the considerations regarding web authoring software use, the software has certainly allowed users otherwise unfamiliar with web design to create and publish their own sites and pages. There is presently no way to know exactly how many pages on the Web have been designed with web authoring software, but a search engine inquiry on a popular software package, Microsoft Front Page, returned more than 36 million results (a similar query on Adobe's Dreamweaver web authoring software returned more than 31 million results). Certainly, web authoring software has made a significant contribution to the number, variety and quality of pages on the Web.
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