There are many ways of making a website with HyperText Markup Language (HTML), and there also are many HTML tools to help people use this language faster or more efficiently. HTML editors can be simple or complex, and some may not offer any assistance at all for website designers. Some HTML tools are made to help with one section of HTML code, such as tables or forms, and they help people generate the coding. Search engine optimization (SEO) uses HTML in certain ways to help target search results, and there are some SEO tools to properly optimized the coding. Each new version of HTML adds or deletes coding, so there are version-specific tools that assist people in understanding the differences.
Perhaps the most basic of the HTML tools is the HTML editor. In its simplest form, this can be a basic text-editor program that enables the user to type in HTML coding, which then can be exported into a website. More complex editors, known as what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editors, help novices and experienced designers alike. With a WYSIWYG program, if the user types in text and makes a colored box, then the program will generate HTML based on what the user entered.
Many sections of HTML can be customized, but this usually is tedious and difficult for users. For example, text can be customized for size, color and font type; forms can be customized for submissions and questions; and tables can be optimized for size, borders and padding. These HTML tools usually perform in-depth HTML generation and typically help users understand all the options they have when coding.
To help get high search rankings, HTML should be coded in a way that makes it easy for search engines to read and crawl the website, because poor HTML may inhibit crawling. For this reason, SEO HTML tools go through the coding and remove unneeded sections and optimize others. While this does not guarantee high search rankings, it should help. Another benefit is that the coding for high search rankings typically is a cleaner type of code, which should improve loading speeds.
HTML occasionally is upgraded, and each upgrade introduces and deprecates tags. Version-specific HTML tools are optimized to teach and show users how the new HTML version works. This typically is packed in a common HTML editor, but it sometimes is a standalone program. The standalone version may or may not be able to create websites, depending on how powerful the program is.
