TCB WebEdit

What is WebEdit?

Like many solution designers, I prefer to edit my HTML documents "by hand." This because the HTML code generated by most HTML editors is extremely wordy and often difficult to decipher. While some editing HTML docs I became tired of editing, saving the document in Notepad and then loading it into a browser. I was also tired of writing the same tags over and over ad nauseum. So I set out to create a simple editor that just worked.

WebEdit is a very simple program that is designed to let the user edit a document with a simple editor. WebEdit displays an edit window containing some information text. WebEdit simultaneously renders the document in its on-board web-browser.

Using WebEdit

WebEdit uses an "open face" user interface with a menu bar. Open face means that all the controls are contained in a single visible window. The graphic below shows the WebEdit edit and browse windows.

click to enlarge
The program functions by first selecting a document to edit with WebEdit. Clicking the Files menu item displays two choices:
  1. Load Web Document
  2. Save Document

Selecting Load Web Document, the user is presented with a dialog to open a file. As soon as you select a document, it is immediately loaded into the editor and simultaneously displayed in the browser.

Changes made to the document are immediately displayed in the browser window. This makes it WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor. Very slick. The advantage of this method are obvious. The composer can see the code and the rendered results simultaneously

Other Menu Selections

The Files menu item, Save Document provides a dialog that lets the user save the edited document

The View menu item simply loads the editor text into the browser window. If the browser isn't loaded, it will be loaded with the text in the editor. The On Top menu item toggles whether the WebEdit window stays on top of other windows or not. The The Exit menu item does that, exits the program.

The Help menu item displays to choices. The first choice, About WebEdit, displays a message box with information about the program. The second choice, the Help WebEdit menu item, searches for the WebEdit documentation file, in the application folder or application folder\docs.

Selection Boxes

Under the menu bar is a set of selection boxes. The first box contains a list of available fonts the user can insert in the document, usually in a font tag. The user selects a font the hits the Enter to insert the font name into the text.

The second box contains a list of common tags. These tags are used to provide an effect to a selection of text. It is designed such that when you hit the Enter key, any highlighted text is enclosed in the tag.

The third box contains a short list of tags that use file specifications. It works just like the box above. However, it first asks if you want to select a file by presenting a dialog box. If the user selects a file then the file specification is enclosed in the tag and insert at the point of the cursor in the text.

To the left of the second box is a column of three tiny colored buttons. The turquoise button refreshes the browser. The red button takes the browser back. The green button takes the browser forward.

Initializing WebEdit

WebEdit uses the standard TCB initialization file, tcbinit.txt, to reset some parameters of WebEdit. It is a simple text file consisting of one line of text for each property to be set. A line consists of a keyword followed by an equals sign followed by the property text as in, property=text. The specifications affect WebEdit in the tcbinit.txt file are:


































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Contact: Fred Pierce, makpiya@aol.com, makpiya@gmail.com, 831-663-0543