Digital BW, The Print

Paul writes:

> I have FrontPage, but after fooling around with it a
> bit I abandoned it.

Note that FrontPage also requires special software on the server, and this
software has been an inexhaustible source of security breaches for every
site that runs it.

I use a crusty old copy of Visual InterDev to write my HTML.  I never
actually use any of the web-authoring features, but I like the very nice
text editor that comes with the product.  Also, InterDev is good at keeping
track of files and updates.  However, since it requires the dreaded
FrontPage extensions, I run it only against an isolated server that is not
on the Net.  When I finish updating a page (by hand, since I still write my
own HTML), I copy the file to a production server that does not have
FrontPage installed.

I could do all of this with Notepad, too.  But the InterDev text editor is
nicer, and the file updating features are handy.

> Rudimentary HTML is very simple.

Agreed.  And even very nice pages can be built with relatively simple HTML.
And they are small, so they load very quickly when people visit the site.
And since they don't have a lot of weird features in use, they run on any
browser (it is even possible to browse my site with a text-only browser,
although that is just a side effect of the simplicitly of basic HTML, not
something I deliberately designed into the site).