HTML editors: Nvu and Bluefish [LWN.net]

HTML editors: Nvu and Bluefish

Posted Apr 15, 2004 17:39 UTC (Thu) by cthulhu (guest, #4776)
Parent article: HTML editors: Nvu and Bluefish

Here's a question for web developers out there.

My web devevelopment needs are rather modest, but I could benefit from a
powerful tool. I mainly want to maintain and add too my own personal web
page. It could have lots of random things on it, including family
pictures and the like.

In the few programs I've used (Quanta being the most recent), there's no
obvious way to deal with something that I find I inevitably need to deal
with, and that is changing the directory structure of my site as it gets
bigger. It would be *really nice* if I could use the tool to create a new
subdir and move a selected bunch of files there, and then have the link
references to those files in all HTML be updated to reflect the new
location.

This would let me reorganize things periodically as my content grows. I
don't see why I should have to plan the whole file structure before I
start, and even if I did, what if I was unsatisfied with the result?

Is there something that does this? If not, why not? Is it just plain
"wrong" for some reason to rely on the tool to do this work? Perhaps it
exists in the tools and I don't know about it because I'm expecting it in
the wrong place.

Thoughts?

(Log in to post comments)

Re: updating link references in the HTML

Posted Apr 15, 2004 22:03 UTC (Thu) by amazingblair (guest, #2789) [Link]

cthulhu,

No, there's nothing wrong with doing that, and yes, there's a product that handles it. Unfortunately it's a Windows program, but it's a truly excellent product. I use Dreamweaver MX 2004; it's one of the few Windows apps that are "must have" for now, until a good Linux alternative comes along. Dreamweaver handles all links when you move or rename a file -- or a whole folder -- beautifully.

Before Dreamweaver I used Allaire HomeSite, and it had a very flexible multi-file find and replace utility. With that you could, for example, replace all instances of "src='logo.png'" with "src='/image_dir/logo.png'" if you were shuffling all your graphics into /image_dir.

(BTW, Macromedia and Allaire merged, and HomeSite is now the Code View of Dreamweaver.)

-Amazing Blair