Netscape Navigator Gold (3.01)

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Definition:

The version of Netscape Navigator 3.01 which includes HTML editing software.

Advantages:

• Near What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) Editing. A page being edited in Gold looks almost like the original page and is edited much like a word-processing document. The user is not required to know HTML.
• Uploading capability. Netscape Gold allows the user to automatically upload the HTML file and associated images to the Web Server.
• DTD Checking. Gold forces the user to use correct and legal HTML ensuring that the document conforms to the standards of Netscape's DTD (Document Type Declaration). This means that the HTML will not 'break' in any Netscape browser

Disadvantages:

• Inability to change DTD's. Since the editor is made by the same company as the leading Web Browser, the documents conform to Netscape's HTML standards, which differ from the official HTML 2.0 standards and may not appear correctly in all browsers. If the user is designing for browsers other than Netscape's they should consider using another editor.
• Images always contain the HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes. Due to a bug in this version of 3.01, all IMG tags contain the HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes. In most cases this is a good thing, as it allows the browser to load the page completely and then fill in the images, however for images which change size (such as a web counter) this could cause future iterations of the images to be rendered in a distorted fashion. As far as the author can tell the only way to fix this is to manually remove the HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes with a text editor.
• Link problems. Being able to view and edit the same HTML document both locally and remotely leads to problems with Hypertext links within the document. The manual is unclear how to solve these problems. Netscape Gold works best with locations where all HTML and images are located in the same directory.

Other Ways to Edit HTML:

There are many other options for HTML editors. If the user is familiar with the HTML language it can be done with a simple text editor. Many professional HTML editors such as HoTMetaL allow for a number of different DTD's. Many of the newer applications (MS-WORD with Internet Assistant for example) can export a document as HTML.

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