[Scottish] HTML templating software?

[Robert(Rob) M. Schneider]

David,

You don't have to use FrontPage "Editor".  Use any editor you like.  But it 
is a good editor. I've tried some of the Linux equivalents, e.g. Mozilla's 
Compose, and FP is more reliable and has better functionality.  Remember to 
separate "FrontPage the editor", from "Front Page the web site manager tool". 
 But you are right, it's not a Linux tool and for that I wish there were one 
that worked in Linux like FP works in Windows.  If I felt the Linux market 
would support it, I would develop a FP clone for Linux,but I believe the 
Linux market wants web-programming tools, not things like FP.

I hear assertions about how the editor produced bloated non-standard HTML. 
but frankly I have no real evidence.   I've read HTML books, but never a book 
on standards-based HTML.   I've not pursued it. I find that our sites work 
fine in the various versions of IE, Netscape, Mozilla, and Galeon.  That's 
all I've tested.  I don't expect any more.  I just want it to work and it 
does.  I think it's a bit of a red herring issue.  I'm pretty sure it 
complies to standards to a greater extent than hand-coding HTML would.  And 
like I say, it's ability to move things around is really where you get a lot 
of personal productivity improvements without coding. 

I do know if you paste in Tables and Text from Word or Excel it's not 
acceptable...adds all the formatting from Word/Excel into the HTML which is 
usually not what I want. Hardly ever do that though, or if forced to I have 
ways to over-come the problem with some macros a cleaver collegue wrote to 
clean out the HTML from Office.  HTML from Word/Excel 97 (now 6 or 7 years 
ago.."almost" before the Internet)  is really bloated. I don't know about 
Office 2000 or Office XP.

I've not used or experienced Dreamweaver.  I suspect it has FP features.  I 
used ColdFusion a very long time ago ... that also has surely changed, but 
when I used it was for programming sites.

I'm into content and communication by web and other electronic means.  I know 
all about the technology and the tools/programming, but at the end of the day 
it's the content that matters to me.  FP helps us get content out faster and 
more productively than any alternatives we looked at (considering the large 
scope of the business processes we are involved in).

Re Win4Lin ... cost about US$70 as I recall.  VMWare is much more expensive.  
Don't know much about it.  Win4Lin worth it for what I want (FrontPage, 
Quicken, and occasional use of Word/PowerPoint/Excel).  Even makes Win 98 and 
applications go much faster, "boots" faster, etc. etc. I could not get Wine 
to work with Quicken, although it worked for Office.  Don't recall if I ever 
tried FP or not becaus by then I alerady bought Win4Lin.  Win4Lin only works 
if you already have Win 98 or 95 (which I do), but not with NT/2000/XP.  
VMWare might work with NT/2000/XP--don't know and not planning to pursue this 
anyway.

As mentioned, my new discovery is rdesktop on linux to run Window's app's 
installed on an XP box on our network.  With that I don't need Win4Lin 
anymore and may well move that direction (but not at priority). rdesktop is 
open source (I believe ) and available from http://www.rdesktop.org

re sitecopy and rsynch ... keep in mind that rsynch is not an ftp-based tool, 
and you (I think) need rsynch on the server also to make it work for web 
publishing ...  they are both equivalent in functionality and bandwidth for 
purposes of web publishing, but have to check if your web server can use it 
to communicate with your box.  Just letting it rip for however long it takes 
to me doesn't spell out any significant differences between sending only 
changed files, or just sending individual parts of invidual changed files.  
If a huge web site with lots of changes, then I can see it making an 
economic/bandwidth difference.  but in this situation, you'd have probably a 
dynamic site anyway.  There is also an NT equivalent of rsynch called 
robocopy which is part of NT Resource Kit.

On Tuesday 03 Dec 2002 1:09 pm, David Marsh's list-reading hat wrote:
> Hi Rob,
>
> On Tue, 3 Dec 2002 06:30:33 +0000
>
> "Robert(Rob) M. Schneider" <rmschne@rmschneider.com> wrote:
> > Far as I know (and I continue to look) there is nothing which comes
> > close to Microsoft FrontPage for these features.  Your pages are
> > static, wish to have templates, themes, etc. etc.
>
> eek, bleech.. ;-/
>
> FrontPage used to be famed for producing notoriously invalid and bloated
> 'HTML', which is enough reason for me not to touch it!
> Standards-compliance is quite important to me.
>
> I have no idea whether it has improved in recent versions,
> notwithstanding the obvious that it's not a Linux solution, and it's
> from the beast itself..
>
> I guess that Dreamweaver for Linux might be a nice thing, but I guess I
> can, err, dream, about that..
>
> > As you observed, PHP
> > is probably not what you want (it' a programming language).
>
> My 'objection' to PHP in this instance is not that it's a programming
> language (most of these HTML preprocessors are programming languages of
> a sort) but that (afaik) PHP 'needlessly' impedes cacheability of pages
> that aren't "intrinsically" dynamic as each document is assembled on the
> fly live on the server before being served, which will be an unnecessary
> overhead for most documents that I will write (Having said that I will
> be playing with PHP on some occasions, I am sure). This is why I would
> prefer a system that I can preprocess locally and then upload (static)
> changes to the server.
>
> > I retain my Windows setup to run FrontPage.  I use Win4Lin on the
> > desktop,
>
> Is Win4Lin the expensive one or the really expensive one? ;-)
> (VMWare being the other)
> Does anybody have any experience of Crossover Wine?
>
> > and I'm increasingly using rdesktop to access and remotely
> > use an XP box for this purpose.
>
> That sounds interesting. Is rdesktop free? I must look into it..
>
> > You can supplement FrontPage's publishing capability with something
> > like "sitecopy" (search Google for this word to find it's home page)
>
> Yes, I currently use sitecopy, it's a really excellent wee tool,
> although I am now planning to change to rsync (once I suss it out) as
> this has the bandwidth/time-saving advantage of only uploading diffs
> rather than entire files.