Tools for Viewing and Authoring

Apart from Opera, the software presented here is available only for Windows platform.

Opera, from Opera Software ASA, Norway (http://www.opera.com) is a web browser that is fast, small, standard compliant, reliable and free. It is superb for web-developers. Opera is available for many operating systems beside Windows. It supports - among other things - Unicode character encoding standard, older coding page standards and most of the Web standards. Opera is my default browser.

EmEditor from Emurasoft Inc., Japan (http://www.emurasoft.com) is a text/source editor that is fast, small, standard compliant, reliable and almost free. "Files that EmEditor can deal with are text files written with Shift JIS, JIS and EUC. You can also use Unicode UTF-8, UTF-7 and many kinds of code pages which are installed on the Windows system. [...] The HTML, CPP, BAT and INI configurations as well as the Normal configuration are predefined. With these configurations, you can highlight, for example, C++ keywords and HTML tags. Moreover, when you open files, configurations associated with the file extension of the file being opened will be selected automatically." EmEditor is my default editor.

HTML Tidy by Dave Raggett (http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/tidy/) automatically fixes HTML/XHTML source mistakes and tidy up sloppy editing into nicely layed out markup. "It also works great on the atrociously hard to read markup generated by specialized HTML editors and conversion tools, and can help you identify where you need to pay further attention on making your pages more accessible to people with disabilities. Tidy is able to fix up a wide range of problems and to bring to your attention things that you need to work on yourself." HTML Tidy is free.

Real Validator 1 by Liam Quinn (http://www.arealvalidator.com/) is a standards compliance validator for HTML and XHTML documents. It is small, standard compliant, reliable and available with a 30-day trial period. It can validate documents encoded in Unicode, as well as a number of common character encoding schemes. It supports validation of XHTML 1.0, HTML 4.01, HTML 4.0, HTML 3.2, HTML 3.0, and HTML 2.0. It is also extensible, so one can add further standards definitions, for instance XHTML 1.1 It includes complete HTML 3.2 and HTML 4.0 references.

Xenu's Link Sleuth (TM) by Tilman Hausherr (http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html) is a broken link checker that is small, reliable and free. "Link verification is done on "normal" links, images, frames, plug-ins, backgrounds, local image maps, style sheets, scripts and java applets. It displays a continously updated list of URLs which you can sort by different criteria. A report can be produced at any time."

Smart FTP 1 by Mike Walter (http://www.smartftp.com) is an FTP client with an Internet Explorer like user interface. Smart FTP 1 is free.

• W3C HTML Validation Service
• Character encoding standards
• Knowledge base