BBEdit HTML extensions

• Version: release 9
• Author: Charles Bellver
• Requirements: BBEdit
• Cost: free
• Pros: simple and straight-forward
• Cons: not feature-rich
• Remote location: <URL:http://www.uji.es/bbedit-html-extensions.html>
• Tricks location: <URL:http://152.1.24.177/teaching/archives/bbedit-html-ext.hqx>

The BBEdit HTML Extensions, like the BBEdit HTML Tools (described below) are extensions to BBEdit. BBEdit is a full-featured text editor supporting enhanced find/replace functions, line wrapping and unwrapping, and various other "text tweaking" features. BBEdit comes in two versions. The enhanced version costing about $100 includes these features as well as AppleScriptability, automatic line wrapping, and a host of Internet tools. (For more information try <URL:ftp://ftp.std.com/pub/bbedit/bbedit-lite-30.hqx>.)

HTML Extensions has a nice template feature providing a straight-foward method of locating prewritten headers and footers. Furthermore, if you first open a previously saved document and then use the template function, HTML Extensions will incorporate the text into the BODY of your HTML.

Creating links and anchors in our HTML is straight-forward as well. Simply select the text intended to be "hot" and enter your NAME or URL. HTML Extensions does not make you go through an extensive dialog box before you can make some text a link or an anchor. Similarly, the creation of FORMs is not a long, drawn out process where you have to navigate many dialog boxes before anything gets done.

HTML Extensions is not as full-featured as some of the other editors available, and it does not support any "Netscapisms". This not a bad thing since Netscape has created their own flavor of HTML, and if you were to use HTML Extensions, then you could rest assured of creating valid HTML documents. At the same time there seems to be some blatant omissions. For example there seems to be no way to enter the tag for horizontal rulers (<hr>) or line breaks (<br>). This is not an oversight by the author. Rather these tags have been omitted because they are so easy to enter by hand or incorporate into BBEdit's glossary function.

Eric last edited this page on September 26, 1995. Please feel free to send comments.