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SoftQuad HoTMetaL

SoftQuad Inc. is a company specializing in SGML authoring tools. They have created a specialized editor for HTML, called SoftQuad HoTMetaL, and have made a basic version of this program available free of charge, to run on Microsoft Windows and Sun or compatible SPARC systems running SunOS 4.x. There is also a commercially supported version, SoftQuad HoTMetaL PRO, which has a wider range of features and is available for the same platforms, with a Macintosh version on the way. The free X Window System version of SoftQuad HoTMetaL is shown below:

SoftQuad refer to HoTMetaL as a word processor for the Web. It allows you to view and edit the source HTML, but also allows WYSIWYG editing, including features such as cutting and pasting URLs, spell checking and thesaurus, validation of HTML and a previewer function which launches a browser program. The browser program selected is configurable but defaults to Mosaic.

SoftQuad HoTMetaL PRO has the facility to slot in external conversion filters so that they appear in one of its menus. The conversion programs are not supplied, but must be obtained elsewhere - freely available filters (or your own programs) would be suitable. However, it does come supplied with a filter named tidy, which can improve the syntactical quality of existing HTML documents.

The editor includes the facility to display in-line images in the document and also to exclude them, so that the appearance of a Web document viewed with a text-only browser can be checked. It also incorporates a graphical table editor (tables are a feature of HTML version 3.0, which is not yet widely available, but soon will be). The rules-checking facility within the editor makes it impossible to create an HTML document with an invalid structure. This facility may be turned off.

Spinning the Web by Andrew Ford
© 1995 International Thomson Publishing
© 2002 Andrew Ford and Ford & Mason Ltd
Note: this HTML document was generated in December 1994 directly from the LaTeX source files using LaTeX2HTML. It was formatted into our standard page layout using the Template Toolkit. The document is mainly of historical interest as obviously many of the sites mentioned have long since disappeared.