Switching from FrontPage to KompoZer Discovering the Distinguishable Features Eric Geier
Monday, November 24, 2008 11:16:10 AM
If you've used any web authoring application, or even a word processor,
you'll likely understand how to do the basics; type and format text, bullets,
and lists, insert tables, create hyperlinks, and so on. So let's discover some
features in KompoZer that you're probably not familiar with:
Better XHTML support - Developing pages based on XHTML in FrontPage
is possible, however KompoZer provides better support for this language.
Clicking the XHTML option on the New dialog box provides a properly formatted
blank page. What is XHTML, you ask? Well, it is an improved version of HTML,
which combines HTML and XML. Web pages in the XHTML language, which doesn't
differ all that much from HTML, are inherently better written. This provides
for better cross-browser compatibility and easier execution or display in
browsers on less powerful, mobile, devices.
CSS Editor - This tool is extremely useful if you aren't a
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) expert-- like
me. Instead of having to reference and follow the CSS
rules, the editor can create style
sheets for you based upon the formatting attributes you select from the
dialog boxes, such as Figure 2 shows. This tool is accessible from the Tools menu on the toolbar.
Insert PHP code - Instead of having to manually type the PHP start
and end tags
into HTML pages when you want to include PHP code, this feature lets you
type or copy the PHP code into a dialog box. KompoZer takes care of wrapping
your code with the proper tags, beginning with <?php and ending
with ?>. You can access this feature from the toolbar's Insert
menu.
Friendship (XFN) links -
KompoZer lets you optionally define your hyperlink's XFN
(XHTML Friends Network) properties from the hyperlink dialog box, rather than manually doing it. XFN
is an emerging approach to enable owners of personal
web sites, blogs, social networking pages to publically share what type of
relationship they have with whom they link to. Attribute values (such as
friend or acquaintance) are added to a link's tag in the HTML code. There
may be several ways where all this becomes more useful in the future; these
links may provide the backdrop for a social networking system.