At 13:20 05/04/02 +0100, James Carter wrote:
If you can produce a web page in a text editor then USE Frontpage (2000 onwards) or Dreamweaver. They will produce good code if used for the basics (ie don't use them to produce a page like you would in a graphical word processor)
That last sentence says it all. In my experience, sit a novice down with a WYSIWIG editor and it is almost impossible to stop them going way beyond the basics, because they don't know - and can't see - what is basic and what isn't: it's all just click-and-drag... I should own up though. My experience isn't in a school, but teaching with the OU (and in FE). One OU course I taught (T171) required students to submit assignment work using HTML as the medium. Since both staff and students provide their own machines, there is no uniformity whatever between the kit of author & reader. That's an unusually demanding situation. However, I found that there were 3 classes of work: - a very few students were experienced HTML authors - they're not really relevant to this discussion; - next, and since I plugged the point to my utmost, the largest class, were those I'd persuaded to ignore the tool provided by the OU (AOLPress) and use Notepad to modify some very basic templates I provided myself - I could read all of them perfectly; - finally, the smallest class of all, work produced using a clever tool - not one of those pages rendered well on my kit and some were so bad that I could only read them by opening the source in a text editor! I found that persuading the students to use a simple tool was the only way I could ensure that they produced HTML that was simple enough to work reliably... I accept that schools are facing different problems and different contraints, but unless you are fortunate enough to have everyone using the same browser on the same specification of display (as a minimum level of compatibility), then I think my observation is still relevant as the fastest way to solve compatibility problems. But that's just my opinion! Good networking, Roger Beaumont