184HOW: HTML, the Building Blocks of Life Itself: View Source

■Optima-System Page Spinner. www.optima-system.com/ pagespinner/ (for Mac OS)

■Allaire HomeSite. www.allaire.com/products/homesite/ (for Windows)

A Netscape Bonus

In addition to View Source, Netscape Navigator’s browser includes a nifty

File menu option called View Page Info. Choose it, and the entire page will be deconstructed for you in a new window, image by image. Beside each image’s name you’ll find its complete URL (you remember…its address on the Web), its file size, how many colors it contains, and whether or not it uses transparency. Click the link beside each image, and the image will load in the bottom of the window.

The way this works is not immediately intuitive; it was laid out by engineers, not by designers or usability experts. But once you get the hang of it, you’ll find View Page Info a useful tool for understanding how other people have created web pages. IE does not offer this feature.

The Mother of All View Source Tricks

Viewing source is all well and good, but what’s even better is viewing that source code in your text editor of choice. That way, you can continue to work in your chosen HTML editing environment instead of dragging and dropping (or cutting and pasting) between different software programs. You also will have less clutter on your screen. And if your editing program wraps text, you won’t have to cope with the endless lines of markup that browsers often spit out by default in their built-in View Source windows.

Doin’ it in Netscape

On the Mac: Pay a visit to your Netscape Options menu. Under Options,

Applications, View Source, switch from the default program to your HTML editing program of choice (for instance, BBEdit or PageSpinner). Now when you view the source of any of your existing web pages, the resulting HTML document will automatically open in your preferred HTML program, ready for further editing. Pretty nifty. Similarly, when you View Source on someone else’s site, the code will open in your HTML editor of choice, tempting you to steal other people’s work and condemn your soul to Hell.