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However, it does follow many ofthe rules, including closing most container elements, avoiding most deprecatedelements, and using the appropriate elements for much of the markup. Itdoesn't follow all the rules of an XHTML document—for instance, emptyelements don't include a trailing slash. Composer's StrengthsĬomposer is an HTML 4.01 transitional DTD-compliant Web browser. You can get Composer simply by downloading Netscape from that's downloaded and installed, Composer is availableimmediately. In Netscape 6.x, all you need to dois choose File, New, Blank Page to Edit to begin working with Composer. It's part of the standard Netscape distribution, which nowincorporates all the modules (Web browsing, e-mail, newsgroups, and Composer)that used to comprise Netscape Communicator. The fact that NetscapeCommunicator (the main version of Netscape's software in the late 1990s)went quite a while without significant updates also hurt Composer, because itwas stuck at a particular support level of HTML for quite a while.Ĭomposer has been updated for Netscape 6.x, however, and it turns in a decentperformance. It's also gotten a bad rap fromsome Web authors, perhaps because earlier versions were partial to Netscape-onlyelements and the code tended to be a bit messy.

While Netscape Composer doesn't exactly belong in the same class as theother graphical editors discussed in this chapter, it's worth covering forone primary reason—it's free. In this chapter, you'll take a look at some popular graphical editors,including the differences between them and the advantages for Web authoring. Best of all, yougenerally do less editing of elements and tags by hand. Atthe high end, a graphical editor can enable you to work with complex style sheetconfigurations and CSS positioning or other DHTML procedures. The advantages of a graphical editor are obvious—you don't have totype all those crazy codes! Nearly all graphical editors let you lay out yourpage with tables, create framesets, or even add some JavaScript to the page. If you've been reading the chaptersof this book in order, you should have no problem managing a graphicaleditor. You want toknow what your graphical editor is doing, whether it's doing thingscorrectly, and how to augment its capabilities or fix any mistakes or problemsthat crop up by digging into the code. My recommended path for a Web author is to learn XHTML first.