Using HTML TagWriter 3.7

allows you to search for text and/or replace it in all files of a desired folder (and subfolders). You can choose to only search in TEXT files (recommended), and to exclude certain files like images by adding their extensions (.gif,.jpg,.mov,...) to the "Exclude files ending in…" list. If you are searching for or replacing more than 1 line of text, or the text contains diacritical marks, you must make sure the correct file format (Windows, Macintosh, UNIX) is selected. E.g. if you're searching in UNIX documents, select "UNIX", or you won't find anything.
To open a file from the list of found files in the editor, just click it.

"Add to favourites": Most likely you will have some files that need to be edited frequently, like the main page of your site. To avoid searching it again and again in the "Open file..." dialog, you can add it to the "Favourites". To do this, simply open the file and choose this command. To access the favourites, hold down the mouse on the "Open..." button in the "File" palette and choose "Favourites". See "Preferences" for how to edit your list of favourites.

"Preferences...": This takes you to the preferences.

'Palettes' menu
The palettes can be used in two ways: as floating palettes or as a fixed button bar.
The first 4 menu items can be used to open or close a palette, and commands 5 & 6 can open or close all palettes at the same time. Mind that palettes fixed in a button bar cannot be closed.
The appearance of the button bar is controlled with the following menu items or function keys:

"Normal ButtonBar" (F5) will fix the 'File' and 'Tools & Settings' palettes into a button bar and leave the 'Text' & 'Objects' palettes free,

"Full ButtonBar" (F6) will fix all palettes and

"No ButtonBar" (F7) will make all palettes floating. The recommended setting is "Normal", but on very large screens it can be handy to have all palettes floating; and on small screens it will be handier if all palettes are fixed into a button bar (which is done automatically on 9" screens).

*Palettes

This program has only a few menu commands for editing your document, so almost everything is handled by the 4 palettes.

The small button at the right of a floating palette's title bar reduces it to only its title bar, this is the same as "WindowShade" in MacOS 8. And like many other Mac windows, you can drag a palette without bringing it to the front by holding down the Command key.

Most buttons in these palettes can be used in several ways: simply clicking them will perform a "standard" action; buttons whose icon has a small "triangle" feature a pop-up menu with more options, which can be reached by holding down the mouse on the button until the menu pops up. Some buttons also perform special actions when the Shift or Command keys are held down.

A handy feature of these palettes is that they can be 'called' anytime at the right position by typing their command key code with the Shift key held down! For example, you're typing at the bottom right corner of your 21" screen, you want to apply a style but the 'Text' palette is at the top left corner of the screen, at a distance of thousands of pixels. Don't touch your mouse, but simply press Command-Shift-T and the palette will pop up just above the selected text!
The same counts for the other palettes: look in the "Palettes" menu for the appropriate command key codes. Mind that this does not work if the palette is fixed in a button bar.

If you have an extended keyboard, you can also use the Function keys (F1 to F7) to control the palettes: F1 to F4 have the same effect as the menu commands 1 to 4 of the "Palette" menu and F5 to F7 have the same effect as "Normal ButtonBar", "Full ButtonBar" and "No ButtonBar" respectively.

File Palette

-New: Makes a new HTML document. You will be asked the name, text size, background color and/or other document properties, depending on the settings in the preferences. Of course you can change or add these later at any time.
If you hold down the mouse on this button, you can choose to make a minimal HTML document (with only the very necessary tags), a blank document (no tags), a frameset, or to "clone" a file. The latter means that you create a new document with the same header & body properties as an existing file.
You can create one of 4 preset types of framesets. Of course you can resize and add frames to your taste afterwards by editing the templates. However, anything more complex than these 4 templates is to be avoided. Mostly even only the first two templates should be amply sufficient. After creating the new frameset, don't forget to replace the "PAGE LOCATION x HERE" with real URLs.

-Open..., Save, Save as...: These are standard functions, so I suppose no explanation is necessary.
If you hold down the mouse on the "Open..." button, a pop-up menu appears with the last 5 files and your favourite files!

Tools & Settings Palette

- Mark & Select Mark: You can use the 'Mark' button in the editor to mark any text in the document. You can use this feature to insert clickmap data or imported text: after having marked the place where the data or text should be placed, go to the map maker or text importer. When you're done, click the 'Insert' button there and the data or text will be inserted at the marked position. If you click the 'Select Mark' button, the marked text is selected.

- Table: As you may know, tables in HTML are one of the trickier things to make and on top of that, different browsers may have different "interpretations" of table layout. If you click this button, a new table will be inserted with a single column & row. To minimize the tag-typing work, there are several advanced options available from the pop-up menu:

"Insert new table…": you can choose from several presets: "CxR" means "C columns and R rows". You can specify the dimensions yourself by choosing "Other…" and typing the dimensions in the format "C,R". All necessary table tags will then be inserted so you only need to fill in the table afterwards.

"Convert from tab/comma delimited list": this may be handier if you need to import a table from another application: type or paste the table in the editor, by separating columns by tabs (the tabs will look like ordinary spaces, so pay attention) or commas, and starting a new line for each row. Next, select the text, and choose the appropriate option from the pop-up menu. The only thing you need to do after this, is setting the table's layout to your taste with the attribute pop-up menus for the TABLE, TR and TD tags.

"Generate static/dynamic multi-column table": this is a powerful feature which is especially suitable for creating tables with lists of names, links... You only need to paste the list, with a new line for each item, in the editor. Then select this list and choose one of these two options. The first one will insert table tags so you can customize the table, the second will insert a dynamic command (!MULTICOL⁽³⁾), which is evaluated every time you save your document. This means that if you edit the list afterwards (add, remove or change items), the table will be re-generated automatically! You also have the option to have the items sorted. The sorting is based on the text itself, not on tags. You can put certain items at the top by typing one or more spaces before them. These won't be visible in a browser but have an effect on the sorting order. Any attributes applied to the "!MULTICOL" tag will be used for the generated table.

"Convert to tab/comma delimited list": This is just the inverse of "Convert from...". (When there already are commas in the table, you can only convert to tabs.) Mind that this will remove all existing carriage returns in the table and insert new ones at the end of each row, hence it is only suitable for spreadsheet-like tables. You can save the converted table in a text file afterwards and open it in a database application.

- ImageMap: Click this button to go to the ImageMap maker. Imagemaps are pictures with different regions in it which serve as 'buttons', these can be rectangles, circles or polygons. You can assign a link to each region.
See below for help on the ImageMap maker.
You can easily edit a map in your document by selecting it (entirely) and choosing "Edit this map" from this button's pop-up menu. This will do two things: it will mark the selected text and put the selected map into the map editor. So when you're ready editing the map, just click the "Insert" button in the map editor and the new map will be put in place of the old one.
To import a map from an external file, click at the place where it should be inserted and choose "Import from file..." from the pop-up menu.

- Text Import: click this button to import a text file. For help on the Text importer, see below.
If you're about to import some text at a certain position in your document, it's handier to select that position and then choose "Import text here" from the pop-up menu, which actually first marks the position before going to the text importer, or "Edit this text", which marks the text and copies it to the text importer for editing.

- Find & Replace: quite obvious what these do. Mind that these are not case sensitive. To search on, press Command-G. Hold down the mouse on the "Find" button to choose where to start searching. You can replace text in a part of the file by first selecting that part and then clicking the "Replace" button.
"Multiple files..." takes you to the Multiple File Search & Replace.

- Properties: You can change the document's properties (title, background color,...) and style sheets at any time by holding down the mouse on this button and choosing a property to change. You can delete a property by choosing "Default" or "None" from the pop-up menu. Mind that you can't (and shouldn't) remove a file's title.
A note on the "Framebase" property⁽⁴⁾: this (non-standard) META-tag allows you to specify whether a page is used within frames or not. You can use this together with the "Auto target" feature (see Preferences) to prevent http:// links from being opened within frames unwantedly. If you specify a file, you will be able to choose the available frame names for the "target" attribute in the pop-up menus for "A", "AREA" and "BASE" tags.

-: To open the document in a browser, click this button. If you want to use a browser different from the default, hold down the mouse on this button for a pop-up menu (see below for information on how to list these browsers). Keyboard shortcut: Command-Enter.
If you click this button while editing an embedded file, the file in which it's embedded will be launched. If there are multiple files, you will be prompted to choose a file to launch or open.

- Preferences: Click this button to edit this program's preferences (see below). Hold down the mouse to go to a specific preferences card directly.

- Grow: this button has a pop-up menu with three commands: 'Minimize' sets the window to the minimum size (= as small as it would look on a 9" monitor), 'Fit to screen' sets the window to a default width of 608 pixels and to a height which fits exactly in your screen, and 'Center window' aligns the window horizontally to the middle of your screen.

Text Palette

- Font: you can alter font size, face or style with the pop-up menu. There are 7 text sizes. In most browsers, the text size '3' is the default and corresponds with 12 point text. (Shortcut: press Command-n, where n is a text size from 1 to 7.)
The font faces can be chosen from a user-defined list (see preferences) or from scratch; it should be a comma-separated list with the most preferred font first.
The "style" submenu allows you to apply a style defined by a Cascading Style Sheet⁽⁵⁾. Here you can choose too from a pre-defined list, or use a custom style from the Style Sheet Editor.
If your file (or a linked stylesheet) contains style definitions, these will also be available from this menu under the item "class". For "style" and "class", the FONT or SPAN tag is used, depending on the setting in the preferences.

- Headers: There are 6 header styles, with H1 most important (and thus biggest). The text size and style are set automatically unless you have changed them with style sheets.

- Bold, Italic, Underline, StrikeThrough: StrikeThrough draws a line thrgough the text.
The text styles bold, italic and underline can also be applied by pressing Command-B, I or U respectively.

- Superscript, Subscript: Useful for mathematical formulas or chemical notations like C₂H₅OH.

- 'Logical' Styles: Hold down your mouse on this button and you'll get a whole bunch of these styles. Some of them have just the same effect as Bold or Italic, but others have a specific purpose: 'Pre-formatted' displays text as it is present in the HTML source code, so with carriage returns. 'Code', ... to 'Monospaced' sets the text in a monospaced font (mostly Courier), and 'Blockquote' separates the text from the rest of the page. Mind that 'Blink' only works in Netscape!

- Text Color: If you click this button you'll get a list of the available color names. You can choose between these, or you can click "Custom" to select another color with the Apple Color picker.
Shortcut: hold down the mouse on this button for a pop-up menu. You will even see samples of the colors in this menu!

- Paragraph: Makes a new paragraph with the chosen alignment (hold down mouse). "Justify" only works in the newest browsers.

- DIV: The DIV tag allows to align text and pictures without starting a new paragraph. Mind that <DIV align="center"></DIV> is equivalent to <CENTER></CENTER>, therefore the CENTER tag is no longer supported.

Objects & tags Palette

- Link: Select the text to be linked and click this button. You can choose from different types of links by holding down the mouse on this button. If you want to link to a local file, choose "Choose file..." in the submenu under "local file" and open the file, its URL will be inserted automatically. Mind that this only works if the file you're working on is saved already (otherwise it would be impossible to determine the link's location!)
If there is an e-mail address or a http:// link in the clipboard, or you have selected one in your document, you can choose it from the submenus, and in the latter case you can simply click this button and it will be linked automatically! Also, any http:// links which are present in the lower field of the text importer, will be available from the submenu.

In most browsers, it's possible to make a small comment appear at the bottom of the screen when moving the mouse over a link, by using a small piece of JavaScript in the link's tag. To use this feature, hold down the Command key while you click the "link" button or choose your link type from the pop-up menu, and type the comment. Mind that quotes " and single quotes ' will be converted to " and \' respectively, to avoid JavaScript syntax errors. Keep this in mind when changing a comment afterwards.

You can mark parts of the file as named objects, by choosing "Object name" from the link pop-up menu. This is useful for navigating through large files or making links within files.
You can go to any named object by holding down the mouse on the 'Anchor' button and choosing its name. You can easily make a link to such an object by choosing its name from the submenu under "#anchor link" in the pop-up menu.

"Document section" marks the selected text as a "section", which is a HTML TagWriter-specific feature. Sections can be used to determine the contents of dynamic TOCs, see "New list" below for more info.

- Anchor: This button allows you to jump to any named object or to the top or bottom of the document, and also to embedded files (if any). If you press Shift when holding down the mouse on it, you can do the same with local links in the document. The same functionality is offered by the three buttons

at the bottom of the window.

- Horizontal line: This inserts a simple horizontal divider. To choose its thickness, hold down the mouse on this button. Hold down the Command key to insert a black (non-shaded) divider.

- Image: Hold down the mouse on this button to choose which image you want to insert:

"File..." allows you to open a file⁽⁶⁾ and then insert the image's URL and dimensions automatically. This only works if the file you're working on is saved already (see above) and the image resides on the same disk. If the latter is not the case, only the image's dimensions will be inserted and you need to type the URL manually.

"Clipboard": this only works if an image is present in the clipboard. If it is, its dimensions will be inserted automatically, and you only need to type the picture's location. This method is useful if the image hasn't been saved yet or when it concerns a remote image. If you just click this button and there is an image in the clipboard, you will be asked whether to use its dimensions or not.
The numbers in the submenus represent the border size for the image; if you choose the main menu item only, the border will not be specified (= no border for normal image, border 2 for link).
When inserting a picture, you will be asked to type a comment, which is the text that appears in the place of the image before it is loaded or when it can't be loaded. This is not necessary, but recommended.

- Object: An object can be: a JavaScript (a script which is executed while the page is opened in the browser), a Java Applet (an external program written in Java) or an embedded object, like a sound, movie, QTVR panorama... The <EMBED> tag⁽⁷⁾ may require some extra attributes according to the type of object.
If you embed a QuickTime movie, its dimensions will be automatically inserted and you can choose to set the "autostart" feature on or off. The dimensions used are those with the control bar included, so if you disable the movie's controller, you need subtract 16 pixels from its height.

- New list: From this button's pop-up menu, you can choose between three types of lists: unordered, ordered or definition list. In unordered lists, each new item starts with a bullet (disc), circle or little square. In an ordered list, each item gets a number (1,2,... or I, II, ...) or letter from the alphabet (A,B,... or a,b,...). You can choose which kind of dingbat or number format to use. The default list type for this button (when you only click it) is unordered.

The other menu items can be used to make static or dynamic Tables-Of-Contents (TOCs). These are auto-generated lists of all named objects with links to them. The first 3 types are "static", which means that their actual HTML code is inserted so you can modify it. The last 3 types are "dynamic": if you insert one of these, only a command is inserted, which is evaluated while saving the file. This makes sure that the list is always up-to-date, even if you remove, add or change a named object!
These dynamic lists can be restricted to a specific section of your document (you can create sections in your document with the "Link" pop-up menu). These sections' names can be selected from the attribute pop-up menu for "!DYNLIST" tags. Example: if you created a section "Specifications" and you insert a tag like this: <!DYNLIST type="O" dingbat=2 section="Specifications">, you'll get a list with only the named objects in the section "Specifications" in it.
If you want all the links in the list to point to a certain target frame, specify a "target" attribute for the "!DYNLIST" tag, which will then be applied to all links in the list.
The dynamic lists & section tags are specific for HTML TagWriter, so they won't work in other editors.

- New list item: To insert a new item in a list, click this button. If you want to use a number format or dingbat different from the list's, or select between definition term and definition, choose it from the pop-up menu. Be sure to only use dingbats or items of the type of list you're in.
You can also use unordered list items outside lists.

- Form: Inserts a new form, or form element. You can choose between the "post" and "get" sending methods (when clicking this button, "post" is used) from the pop-up menu. You need to specify an "action", which can be an e-mail URL or the URL of a cgi-script.
A "Fieldset" can be used to group input fields in a form together. Each Fieldset should have a "LEGEND" element which contains a short title for the group.
A "Label" allows to link a piece of text in your document to an input element, for instance the text "Type your name here:" to the corresponding text box. Labels make it easier for disabled people to use forms. You can use an "implicit" label by selecting the text and input element together and wrapping them in a label, but this is only allowed if no table tags or other input elements are within the label. For an "explicit" label, first assign an "id" attribute to the input element, then create a label with this ID (available from the submenu). You can assign multiple explicit labels to the same ID.

- Input: There are lots of input objects for forms, divided in three categories. The "Input" category is divided in text type objects and buttons. The name of a text input object is the one that will be sent with the form, and can be used in scripts too. "Textarea" is a scrollable text field. Its default size is not defined so TagWriter uses some reasonable values, which you can change afterwards of course. "Button" elements are like button-type Input elements, but the difference is that they have both a start and end tag, and anything between them will act as the button. Therefore it's recommended to use this system to make an image a button because it gives more freedom.
The default item for this button (when you simply click it) is a "text" Input object.

- Select: Inserts a selection list, list item or group of list items (hold down mouse to choose, default is item). An item ("Option") or group ("Optgroup") must always be within a "SELECT" object. Options within an OPTGROUP element - if supported - will be rendered as a submenu in your selection list. In HTML 4.0, OPTGROUP elements may not yet be nested.

- Color code: In HTML, you can use either color names or RGB color codes. There are about 16 standard color names, and as much as 16.777.216 color codes. Don't worry, TagWriter will generate those codes for you. If you want to insert a color name or code, click this button to choose from the available names, or to use a custom color, which can be picked in the good ol' Apple Color Picker.
Shortcut: hold down the mouse on this button for a pop-up menu. The 16 color names in this menu are accompanied by a sample of the color they stand for.
If you want to edit an existing color code in the HTML file, select it (with or without quotes) and click this button. Click "Custom" to view and edit the color, or choose a color name from the list. The 'Color' button has more features: hold down the Command key while holding down your mouse on it and you'll be able to choose from some exotic features...
One of these features is 'rounding' the color to a 'web-savvy' code: this is a set of 216 colors which look good on 8-bit color monitors on all platforms. They have only 33,66,99,CC or FF in their color code. All other colors will only look right on high-resolution monitors.

- HTML-ize: To insert line break tags where necessary and convert special characters (à, é, ü, <,...) into valid codes, select the text to convert and click this button. This is necessary because the character set used in webpages is different from the Mac character set.

- Nuke tags: removes all HTML tags and only keeps the text. Hold down the mouse for a pop-up menu which allows to delete only certain tags, like text formatting, tables, images, … When nuking all tags, you can choose whether to convert character codes and line breaks or not. When removing script tags, only the "SCRIPT" and "NOSCRIPT" tags will be removed, the scripts themselves will stay.

*Working with embedded files

An unfortunate limitation of HyperCard-based applications like HTML TagWriter, is that a text field cannot hold more than 30000 characters. So if you want to make a larger file, you need to split it up. But finding a way to work around this limitation has resulted in quite a powerful feature. The "Embed File..." menu command embeds an external file in your document, without actually adding it to the file in the editor itself. Only a command is inserted in the file, and as soon as you save your document, the external file is copied into the document, making one solid file. When you open a file with embedded files, they are stripped and only the embed command is kept, to ensure that the files will be re-inserted when saving.
Embed example

This allows you to make files much larger than 30K, and you can include the same part (e.g. a header or footer) in a lot of pages. In the image at the right, a situation is illustrated where the file "1.html" has three embedded files: A,B and C, and "2.html" has A and C. So A and C are "shared" between the two files, which is perfectly possible. "1.html" and "2.html" are called "parent files". This very help file uses embedded files (try opening it in TagWriter and look at the top & bottom of the file)!
Embedded files are "dynamic", which means that when you edit a file that has been embedded in other files, all those files will be updated automatically when saving that file! This system works with relative URLs (if the files are on the same disk), so as long as you move both files without changing their relative position, you can put them anywhere without breaking the "link" between them. The best (and most logical) place for an embedded file is in the same folder as the file you want to embed it in. If you use links and images in an embedded file, it must be in the same directory as the "parent" file while you're editing it, otherwise local links and image URLs will be incorrect.

To make working with embedded files easier, style definitions, named objects and JavaScript functions defined in the embedded files are also available in the "parent" file, and if a file is embedded in only one file, this also counts in the reverse direction! (If it is embedded in multiple files, a reverse link is impossible because names and functions of the different parent files would get all mixed up.)

You can embed as much files (or the same file more than once) in another file as much as you want, but you can't embed a file in a file which is embedded itself. Embedding a file within itself is not possible (and not useful anyway except for studying infinite loops). Also very important: embedded files should normally have no HTML, HEAD or BODY tags in them!
To discern embedded files from the normal HTML files, it's recommended to use a different extension for them, like ".emb".
When you open a file with an embedded file of which the source file cannot be found, you will be asked whether to save its contents (recommended) or not.
Note: when uploading files with embedded files to your webspace, it's not necessary to upload the embedded files.

You don't need to worry about the file format of embedded files: if the format differs from the file it is embedded in, it will be converted automatically. (For instance, if you have a UNIX-format file which has embedded files in Macintosh and Windows formats, the resulting file will be entirely in UNIX format.) However, this slows down save operations, so it's recommended to always use the same file format.

When opening a file that is larger than 30000 bytes, you can choose to have it split up into smaller parts which are embedded in the first part. This results in a file which looks exactly the same as the original in your browser, but which can be edited in TagWriter. During this process, TagWriter tries to make chunks of 25k to 27kBytes which are separated at logical positions, like the start of a new paragraph or table. So in the worst case, you still have 3000 bytes left per file to add text.

*ImageMap maker

To go to the imageMap maker, click the imageMap button

in the "Tools" palette.
The map maker will tell you what to do after each step. The picture to be mapped may be in a graphics file, like GIF, JPEG (requires QuickTime) or PICT, or in the clipboard. To start, click "New" and follow the directions on the screen.
The map definition must be inserted into the BODY of the HTML document (e.g. right after the BODY tag or before the image's tag). To apply the definition to a picture, insert 'usemap="#mapName"' in the picture's tag (where mapName is the map's name, indeed). Of course this can be done easily with the contextual pop-Up menus.

You can move all objects horizontally or vertically, or scale the entire map. Mind that ovals cannot be used, so if you apply a non-proportional scale, circles will be transformed into circles with an approximative radius, not into ovals.

This imageMap maker is handy for small and simple maps, but for more complex maps you may want to use 'Mapper' by Carl Bäckström instead. Although the author has discontinued the development of this application, you should still be able to find it at software archives like info-mac. A map file made in Mapper can be inserted easily by holding down the mouse on the "Map" button and choosing "Import from file...".

*Text Importer/Converter

Click the "TextImport" button

of the "Tools & settings" palette to go to the text importer.
To import a text file, click "Open...". The file's contents will appear in the upper frame. To convert the file, click "Convert".
You have various options here, like converting the ASCII from Windows/UNIX (= ISO character set) to Mac and backwards, and converting WWW mail forms (these can look like '1+2%2C%0D%0A%0D'). You can convert any text to HTML-format, which is useful to maintain paragraphs and to make sure that special characters like á, ö, ... are displayed correctly on all platforms.
When the text is converted, you can save it or insert it into your HTML file with copy & paste, or by pressing the "Insert" button (if you have marked the position where it should be put with the "Mark" button in the "Tools" palette).
When saving a file in the Text Converter, you can choose the newline format. In contrast with the "File format" feature in the Editor, this only determines the characters used to mark a new line, not the character set, which is saved "as is".

If there are http:// links in the lower text field, these will be available in the Editor's pop-up menus for links and A tags.

*Style Sheet Editor

You can reach the Style Sheet Editor from the "HTML Tools" menu, from the "Document properties" button, or just by editing a style. When you're editing more than a single style, i.e. in the first two cases, an extra field will be visible at the bottom. You can add, remove or edit styles from this field by holding down the mouse on it and choosing the desired command from the pop-up menu. When you're done, you can save the styles in a new file (which can then be used as linked stylesheet), in an existing file, or you can insert them into the file currently in the editor.

When editing multiple styles, you can select for which elements (tags) a style should be used. For example, you can redefine the "STRONG" tag to your taste. You can also create multiple "classes" of styles per tag, by giving them different names. These will then be available for the "class" attribute of the pop-up menus, or in the Font pop-up menu in the Text palette. If you then use the attribute class="styleName" for an element, the text between its start and end tags will show up in the style 'styleName'.
You can also create styles which are available for all tags (these will have a definition looking like ".className {...}").
To use the same style definition for multiple elements, hold down the Shift key while choosing the elements' names from the pop-up menu, or type them, separated by commas, in the field. I.o.w., the definition should look like "element1, element2.className, element3 {...}".

Mind that some style features may be supported only by Internet Explorer, or only by Netscape (although all features are in the W3C standards).
Attributes not available in the editor itself, will be stored in the small field at the right. You can edit the contents of this field, they will be added to the style. This can be useful to add custom CSS attributes.

You can use both an image and a color for the "background" feature (this is recommended, because if the image doesn't load, the color can approximate it). When using an image as background, you will need to select the folder in which the style sheet will be saved, to get the relative path correct (you won't need to do this when editing a style from within the editor because then it's obvious enough in which file the style is used).

*Link Checker

Choose "Exhaustive link check..." from the "HTML Tools" menu to go to the link checker.
To start an exhaustive link check, open a file of your site which is linked to all other pages, in most cases this will be the "index" file. The link checker will then search all local links, check them, go to the valid files and start over, and so on until there are no more files left to check. (If a file has embedded files, these will be checked too.)

In the upper field, the files containing bad local links are shown. You can open a file by Shift-clicking its name, or you can click it to see which links were invalid in the file. If you Shift-click one of these links, the file will be opened too and the bad link will be searched.
In the lower field, all bad links are summarized. You can specify a correct link for each invalid one by clicking it. When you're ready, click "Replace links" and all invalid links will be replaced by your corrections. Links with no specified correction will remain as they are.

Each time you make a major change to your site, it's recommended to do an exhaustive link check, even if you checked each file separately with the editor's link check... maybe you forgot one. After correcting, it's a good idea to redo the check to see if there are no errors left, or new errors introduced.

*Preferences

To go to the preferences, click the "Prefs" button

in the "Tools & Settings" palette. The preferences are spread over four cards which can be accessed by the tabs at the top. You can go directly to a specific card by holding down the mouse on the "Prefs" button.

"Editor" card:

-Text Size: The text size of the editor window.

-Font: The font of the editor window. A monospaced font (such as Courier) is recommended.

-PopUp delay: the time in 60ths of a second until a pop-up menu appears when holding down the mouse on some buttons. A normal value is 15 or 20, but on slower computers you may need to use smaller values. A value of 0 will cause the popup menus to appear always, which is not recommended.

-Use color palettes: (this option will only be visible if you are working on a monitor with 16 grayscales or colors.) If you're using 16 grayscales, the palettes will look better when displayed in grayscale than in black & white so in that case you'll want to turn this option on, but in the case of 16 colors, it's better to use the b&w palettes.

-Palette animation: on slow machines it may be better to disable the animation when "shrinking" or opening a palette.

-Start with blank file: normally, if you quit and re-open TagWriter afterwards, the last file edited will still be in the editor. This can be very handy if Netscape has yet again torn down your entire system while working on an unsaved file, but in some cases it may be better if the program starts "clean" each time it's opened, for instance when it is to be used by different persons. In such case, check this button.

-Use character codes: If this is checked, all non-standard characters will be converted to character codes like é when converting text to HTML. Some servers may get confused about the character set of your HTML files, in that case always turn this option on.

-quote = ": When converting text to HTML you can choose whether to convert quotes (") into the character code '"'. This is only useful if you should need a piece of HTML in a JavaScript, or to avoid confusion with quotes used in attributes.

-& = &: Similar to 'quote = "', but for the "&" character. It's recommended to always turn this on.

-Non-breaking spaces: In a HTML file, multiple spaces are ignored. To insert more than one space between two words, however, you can use non-breaking spaces ( ) (press Option and space to insert one). To do this automatically when converting text to HTML, check this button. Remember that you can type a non-breaking space at any moment by pressing Option-space.

-Lowercase filenames: When this button is checked, all the names of local links and images that are inserted via the "Open file" dialog are converted to lowercase. This is useful to avoid 404 errors on UNIX servers, when for some reason the file names are converted to lowercase during transfer (like on a DOS disk).

-Auto target: If you make a http:// link within a frame, you mostly do that with the intention to launch that link in a "fresh" window, i.e. without frames. To do this, it's necessary to add the property 'target="..."' to the link's tag. You can choose to do this automatically by checking this button. The chosen target will be used (recommended: "top"). It will only work in pages which have a "framebase" META-tag (set by the "Properties" button in the Tools & Settings palette, see above).

-Ask subject: This will dis-/enable the asking of a subject for mailto: links.

-Attribute order: You can choose between "logical" or "alphabetical" order of attributes in the contextual pop-up menus (this is a matter of personal taste although I think most people will prefer "logical").

-Don't look in external files: When a linked style sheet is used, TagWriter will scan for definitions in that file when editing a tag which can use the "class" attribute. If a page has a "framebase" META tag with specified file, the frame names will be looked up in that file. Both of these operations may cause a delay in certain situations⁽⁸⁾, so in such case you may want to turn this on.

-Don't look for JS functions: In the contextual pop-up menus for tags like A, BODY, ... there are attributes like onMouseOver which can trigger a JavaScript function. When the document you're working on contains JavaScript functions, these will be available in those pop-up menus so you can easily apply them. On slow Macs, however, the looking-up of these functions may be slow, so you can disable this option in such cases by checking this button.

"Files" card:

-When creating new file, ask: ...: These are document attributes which can be set when creating a new HTML file with the normal menu commands. Example: if you use CSS for your lay-outs, you won't need the obsolete "Default text size" or even "Text & link colors" and "Background color".

-Include "DOCTYPE" tag: When active, new files will start with this tag, which is put before the "<HTML>" tag. Actually, you can use any tag here, but a "DOCTYPE" tag is most useful. There are 4 preset tags available from the pop-up menu. Mostly, you'll need the third one ("Transitional"), which denotes that your document uses both HTML 4 only tags and older tags. For documents defining a frameset, you should use the fourth tag ("Frameset"). The second one is only to be used if your document contains strictly the recommended HTML 4 tags.

-HTML File Creator / TEXT File Creator: The 'creator' must be a four-byte code and is case sensitive. It tells the Finder which application to use when double-clicking it. (It's like the DOS (=Windows) extensions, but more advanced.)
E.g., if the creator is "H†Wr", the file will have the icon of a HTML TagWriter document, and will be opened in TagWriter when double-clicking. You can use the pop-up menus to select the creators of the most popular browsers and text editors.
The creator chosen for "HTML" will be used for every document containing a "<HTML>" tag in the first 2 KBytes and a "</HTML>" tag, all other files will get the "TEXT" file creator. Mind that changing the 'creator' has no effect on the actual contents of your files.

-Default file format: This determines the default setting (i.e. for new files) for the "File format" of the Editor (see above).
It is recommended to always use either "Windows" or "UNIX" for this setting, depending on whether you may need to edit your files on the respective platform. If you do use "Macintosh", you must always convert all non-standard characters to character codes.

-Warn for invalid names: If checked, the program will warn you if you use an invalid HTML name. Turning this off can be handy if you should be making a lot of files that you'll only use on your own hard disk, for example. If you want to know which file names are valid, it's at the bottom of the document "A short intro to HTML".

-Euro compliant conversion: When checked, the Euro character will be converted correctly from Windows ASCII to Mac ASCII and vice versa. This is because the Euro character is only supported since OS 8.5 and it replaces the "currency sign" which also (and still) exists in Windows. If you don't bother about the Euro character or you really need to use the "Currency sign" for some reason, leave this unchecked.
Mind that the "Euro" character is not displayed in older browsers. If this character: € doesn't look like the Euro currency sign, your browser can't display it.

-Author name: You can personalize your HTML documents by adding a META tag with your name. To do this automatically, just type your name in this field and check the "Include with new docs" button. If you check the other button, "Include when absent", your name will be added to each document you save - if it has no name in it yet. So if you don't want to include your name at all, leave both buttons unchecked. Mind that existing names can only be removed manually, this to avoid accidental plagiarism.

-Include Generator: Another META tag can be included which shows that you are a Genuine Mac Webm@ster and have made your documents with this program. You can choose to always include this information, to only replace existing 'generator' tags, or to remove all 'generator' tags from the documents.

"Favourites" card:

-Edit favourite files: Click this button to view your list of favourite files (which you can make by choosing "Add to favourites" in the "HTML Tools" menu). You can rearrange file names, or remove them. To insert a divider (shown as a dash), press Command and click "Move down".
Change drive…: If you have moved your favourite files to another disk or folder, TagWriter won't be able to find them. To fix this, you can update their locations by using this button. You can simply replace a drive's name, or an entire file path, by clicking "Custom…". (Only use the latter if you know what you're doing.) Mind that the replacing is case-sensitive.

-Edit favourite http:// links: Edit a list of commonly used links which will appear in the link pop-up menu under "http:// link". This will spare you the effort of having to type these all the time.

-Edit favourite mailto:// links: The same, but for mailto: links.

-Default form action: this is the URL that will be pre-set when creating a new form. (Most likely, you'll often use a fixed cgi script or e-mail address for forms.)

-Browsers: You can make a list of your available browsers here. This list will appear when holding down the mouse on the "Launch" button. To choose your preferred browser, hold down the mouse on its name and choose "Set as default". This browser will be used if you click the "Launch" button.
If you move a browser to another disk or folder, the program will no longer find it and you'll need to re-add it.

"Fonts" card:

-Font "face" presets: These is a list of font face definitions that can be called from the "Font" popUp menus. Each definition is a comma-separated list of font names, with the most preferred font first.

-Local Style Sheet Presets: These presets for local style sheet definitions can be used in the font "style" popUp menus and in the contextual menus. Each style needs to have a name, but this name is only used in the menus, not in the document itself.

-Default "style" tag: When choosing a style from the "font" menu in the Text palette, the tag you select here will be used. Traditionally the "SPAN" tag is used for style sheets, but the "FONT" tag has the advantage that you can combine "classic" formatting with style sheets easily, to maintain a decent layout in older browsers.

*Using HTML TagWriter

*General

*PopUp-menus

*Menus