View Your Webpages In Netscape

 Netscape created one of the first browsers and at one time dominated the browser market. Microsoft has since made their “Internet Explorer” the number one browser. Netscape is now part of America Online. 

Netscape has a FREE wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) HTML editor which they call “Composer”. I looked at this editor, but it must have been an earlier version. This version, however, I find very appealing.

Download Netscape Browser version 7.1 which will allow you to view your HTML pages in this browser. This download also contains their free “Composer”.

http://channels.netscape.com/ns/browsers/default.jsp  (261KB)

It downloads as a self extracting file named NSSetup.exe. Double-click the file name and the install should begin. It offers to create a quick launch link for you which I recommend. From that link you can choose to launch either the browser (Netscape Navigator) or the HTML editor (Composer).

By launching Netscape Navigator and typing the address of your website, you will be able to see how visitors to your site will see your pages if they are using this version of Netscape. While that was the intent of my visit to Netscape, I was pleasantly surprised when I took another look at Composer.

This is the best Free wysiwyg HTML editor that I have found. When you open it, there are tabs at the bottom of the window: Normal, HTML Tags, HTML Source, and Preview. These displays closely resemble those of Microsoft FrontPage and SoThink HTML Editor. You really can’t go wrong with either of these three. But since Composer is free, and it will allow you to edit multiple pages at once, it moves ahead of SoThink.

The HTML Tags view is one in which it is easy to determine the various HTML tag elements in your page. Yellow markers indicate the beginning of the HTML element and by clicking the marker, all the text included in that element will be highlighted.

You edit the page by clicking the Normal tab. Then you just type in text and format the font, color, etc. From the menubar, you can click icons to add a hyperlink, an image or a table. Dialog boxes walk you through the details. From the menubar, choose Format to choose page colors or backgrounds. For help, choose from the menubar Help, then select Under the Contents Tab, Creating Web Pages.

Save will save the file to a location on your computer. Publish will upload the file to your webserver.

Publish uses a built-in FTP program to upload the page to your server. This is one of the Features in FrontPage that no program that I have found has been able to duplicate. Netscape Composer now comes closest to doing that.

I tried several attempts to publish to my Host4Profit account with no success. I was able to do it with my $4.95/month hosting account. Get a free 30-day Hosting Trial of this and use the Free Composer to create your webpages. http://dollarware-hosting.com/trial/

I think what complicates the matter here is the differences in hosting accounts and how each expects you to connect to their FTP server. This may take trying several variations of the Site Subdirectory and the Publishing Address. This is worth the effort because you will then be able to view, edit and publish your webpages with ONE program for FREE.