Edit HTML

by David Blackledge

Usage:

• Navigate with Numberpad (with Num Lock ON) or Cursor Keys in IE
• In IE, use ESC if Backspace doesn't work.
• Edit Document properties (Title, Colors, Background Image, and other Header information) under "Properties" tab.
• Type tags and other special characters (like numbers) in special text box
• Navigate past tags and they are displayed in text box, edit display to edit that tag.
• Type <, >, and & to get escaped versions of them, or turn off escaping to type HTML directly
• Turn on MouseClick and click in the document to auto-navigate to that location
• Use Undo and Redo buttons for multi-level undo
• Click "Preview" to view the page stand-alone.
• Click "Save" to save the page. In Netscape choose "Save As..." in IE choose "View Source" and save as a new HTML file.
• Load HTML file in Notepad and copy to clipboard, then paste in the "HTML Source" tab area to "load" it. Edit HTML directly in large textbox if needed.
• Select effect checkboxes to turn on an effect. Move to the right once to go past the end-tag.
• In Netscape, Select Text with Mouse (with MouseClick off):
  • Cut
  • Copy
  • Paste
  • Select effect (perfoms Cut, turn on effect, paste)
• Create a new table and add cells and rows to it with buttons
• Create an image or draw an embedded XBM image with buttons

New:

September/October, 2001
• Added Image button and "embed Image" button (which uses XBMCreator, another of my programs).
• Started using "replace" on the document redisplay to save memory (don't add to history) and I think this helped response time as well!
• Made HEAD and BODY information edited specially (e.g. a "bgcolor" textbox)
• Pasting an HTML document into the large HTML Source text box "loads" the HEAD/BODY fields.
• Moved HEAD/BODY information into a "Properties" tab, HTML Souce into a tab, and left the rest in a "Controls" tab.
• Forces an occasional newline to make code more readable.
• Moves past/deletes multiple white-space characters at once (since that's how HTML works). Currently, delete also deletes one regular character as well [bug].
• Blinking, Built-in cursor image.
• Added links to this page and my web page.
• Cursor Keys and Backspace work in IE now (they can be caught onkeydown, but not onkeypress).
• Broke "Save" and "Preview" into separate buttons. Added instructional pop-up for "Save" and does special processing in Netscape to maintain escaped &, <, and > in saved file.
• Added a "Clear" button to delete the Undo buffer and hopefully save memory.
• Attempts to make a "best guess" when navigating by mouse-click and only updates the screen a few times, rather than tons.

Features:

• Directly type like a WYSIWYG Editor.
• Cursor following.
• Hitting return in a list starts a new list item
• Checkboxes show when you're in an effect and may be used to turn on (and off, if necessary) the effect.
• Table and Image creation buttons
• Ability to Embed (Yes, embed, not link to) Black & White XBM images (e.g.) with XBMCreator (Wow! A suite of Web Development tools written entirely in JavaScript! ;] )
• Optionally translate &, <, and > to their entity equivalents.
• In Netscape: Copy, Paste, and limited Cut abilities (Cut only works if it is a unique instance, currently) (Cut and Copy only work on text that does not contain HTML)
• If a Cut can work, selecting text, then selecting an effect will apply that effect to the selected text.
• Multiple Undo and Redo ability
• Type any needed literal HTML in the "Tags" text box (when it is empty) to insert that HTML (Necessary to insert some trapped characters like 2, 4, 6, & 8, and entities when & escaping is on.
• When navigating (or deleting) the last passed tag appears in the "Tags" text box where it may be edited
• Ugly-but-functional optional ability to click on text to navigate to it.

Still to do:

• Quarantine SCRIPT and STYLE segments, and some HEAD information to prevent crashes when writing document. (though how do I get them back in? same problem exists when hitting the Preview/Save buttons. Only other option is a plain text (source code) output button. [Currently, doesn't output "Other Header Information" in Editing window, just preview/save.]
• Make some more features work in IE (especially cut & paste-related ones).
• Figure out how to make large pages track your location better (maybe with named anchor, but probably no better)
• Make the checkboxes turn off at the right time (rather than one character late)
• Finish the font color/size things. Parse the tags and build a stack to allow nesting.
• Add "home" and "end" keys (7 & 1)
• Improve Click-navigate with some best-guess jumping... even a binary search. [Some work on this already done]
• Support some more tags (especially DIV, etc. Maybe just have a "box" option with a few settings (border, margins, bgcolor)
• With DIV, support the original inspiration behind this editor: direct dragging to establish positioning of some objects.
• Turn some options into a menu system
• Maybe add a color-selector module.
• See if display and event capturing can be separated enough to prevent the need to type slowly.
• Make a server-side-save/load version (mocked it up with Perl on my Tripod site, but they won't let you save arbitrary filenames... only hard-coded ones)
• Maybe make a Signed-script version that can do client-side-save/load.

"Competition"