Coffeecup.com is the home of a range of low cost small scale applications for web developers. This article shows how to exploit some of the features of their first product, an HTML editor.
In a previous article in this series, I suggested that Coffee Cup HTML editor is a very helpful low cost HTML editor. In this article, we shall explore some of the less obvious features which make a real difference to its usefulness.
Before you do any editing it is extremely useful to set up the editor to work the way that you want it to. The best place to start is at Preferences on the Tools menu. Under General preferences, you should ensure that the editor defaults to Code editor and then you need to decide whether you want to develop HTML in 4.01 Transitional or XHTML 1.0 Strict, which will determine what page is generated when you open your first page.
The next key option to set for the serious developer is to set the browsers available for testing pages. This is set at the Testing and Uploading tab. This allows you to set up a range of browsers for testing purposes: I have Opera, Firefox, Google and IE7 setup.
The other key tab before you start is Directories. By setting these preferences at the start of a project, you will save yourself many steps each time you open or save a file.
The File>Blank new page option provides a blank page with a header determined according to the preferences set for HTML or XHTML. If you are importing old HTML, then the Document > Convert to XHTML and lower case is extremely helpful.
If you are creating HTML from Word documents (see my series of articles at http://www.brighthub.com/office/home/articles/10938.aspx as to why you might be doing this!) and have paragraphs defined by <p> and </p> tags and you wish to create bulleted or numbered lists, then the Edit > Strip HTML from selected text is extremely useful. Highlight the text you wish to turn into a list, then use the Edit > Strip HTML from selected text option then use the List toolbar button to convert this passage into a list, either numbered or bulleted.
The toolbar provides quick ways to add links, images, and formatting and the final button provides a shortcut to the test in external browser function.
The preview mode is based upon Internet Explorer: you should use the check in an external browser function to check compatibility with Firefox at least as well. There is a validate HTML mode on the Document menu, but I have found its use frustrating. A much better option is to use the Web developer add-on within Firefox, with its validate local HTML and local CSS options. If you have this add-on installed, then it is a simple step to use the view in external browser option with Firefox to check your code.
If you have used the CoffeeCup add image facility, you may have a parameter within your img tag of align=””. This will upset any W3C based compliance check. It is usually unnecessary, so you can use Edit > Replace to delete it by putting align=”” in the Find box, and leaving the Replace with box empty. In CoffeeCup HTML Editor you can search the current file, all open files, or all files in a specific directory. The latter is the most powerful option but use with care it happens in the background with no option of confirmation.