I’m teaching a new class and I’m thinking of making the documents as webpages instead of traditional handouts. Any suggestions on what sort of software to use?
I’m familiar with HTML and CSS and can make things manually. But manually typing the tags and then adding in class attributes just seems painfully slow compared to using something like Google Doc’s or Word’s Paint Format point and click to copy things over.
I tried doing it with my first handout and it seemed awfully slow compared to just using Word and then converting it to a PDF. But I feel it might be more accessible to others if I make it a traditional webpage.
Why do you want to use HTML if you are not interested in making your documents sematic?
You can produce PDF files using Word or other word processing software. HTML reason d’etre is you want to make a hyper text and you want many documents to reference each another with links. When you only have one documento, is less usefull. PDF and Word support internal links so that part make HTML unnecesary.
What these days users do to create HTML is write in wysiwig editors, that are like featured limited versions of word. Generally inside a CMS like Wordpress. Editors like Frontpage, Dreamweaver etc… are obsolete, nobody use them and are the wrong way to write html.
The main downside I see to this is I want the ability to go back in and edit the HTML and perhaps add JavaScript or something like that to various parts to add some interaction or things that the students might test out and play with. I haven’t checked the state of Word generated HTML lately, but last time I looked it was pretty unreadable.
I’m not sure what you mean by “not making documents semantic”. I would want to add class attributes to elements for example marking items such as variable references in the text as class=“var” or foreign language references as class=“foreign” so I could easily manipulate them from CSS.
As I understand it that is making the documents semantic. As is ensuring that the HTML focuses on semantic only, with the CSS focusing on presentation. Is there nuances to this that I’m missing?
So is the current state someone building a big website would create their own template by hand using a straight text editor. But everyone else would use a CMS specific WYSIWYG editor?
If you’re working in Notepad or something, then you should consider moving to a free, fancy editor. For Windows, I’d suggest a Notepad++ or Microsoft Code. These editors have color coding, multi-select, and fancy stuff that make working with tags a little easier.
In fact, on second thought, if you’re familiar with any IDE you might want to check if it supports HTML/CSS (it probably does). If you’re not, maybe now is the time. Check out free Visual Studio Community. The big challenge with using an IDE (even a basic one like VS Community) is learning the tool, although it’s probably not that high a hurdle.
I’ve been using Notepad++. I do have a copy of Visual Studio (whichever version they give out to academics for free) so I should definitely try that out. Thanks @TimElhajj.
And I had not heard of Markdown @rei. I’ll put that on my list of technologies to look into.
Visual Studio (the proper professional edition) and Visual Studio Code (VS little brother from another mother) are both free now, so you don’t need to worry about academic licenses, just download it on Microsoft’s website for it.*
* Not commenting on the rest, just wanted to post this little PSA.
I really like VS code for lightweight stuff. I think it would be more helpful than Notepad++, which I also use. I use Code for Python, but I feel certain it would handle HTML/CSS for you. Code supports extensions, which is how you get support for Python. Code also supports markdown with an extension, and you can edit markdown in one window and have a preview window open in a side-by-side configuration. You can do similar side-by-side compares with different versions of the same file and lots of other stuff.
Of all the fancy editors, Code is just super nice. It’s my recent favorite!
