System Utilities | Website Design |
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Page 3 of 3 Some Utilities...AI SmartColor. A very useful tool for grabbing color values from the screen display to get the numeric value for typing in. Includes the ability to convert a selected color to the nearest 'web-safe' color. The definition and purpose of 'web-safe' is a strange area - different sources say different things. Some say it is to enable full compatibility with older monitors, while others say it is for the benefit of people with vision difficulties. Even W3C, the world authority on html standards, is unsure whether 'web-safe' colors are needed anymore. BackLinks Master. After you've had a website for some time, you'll gradually find out the real secrets of internet popularity, and one thing you'll soon come across is the high importance of other sites linking to you, which increases your ranking on search engines, while your links to others don't have anywhere as much bearing. BackLinks Master is a very good program for scanning the web to find out who is linking to you - even ones you never knew about. It does have a quirk in that you can only select one of the three major engines in the settings. If you want to keep checking them all you have to constantly edit the settings to do this. But the data it retrieves is well worth having. SimpleTidy. W3C is the body responsible for setting web standards. It also lays out rules called 'xhtml' which is basically the same as html but keeping to strict rules. It is always preferable to have all your web pages 'xhtml compliant' but requires that you're very careful with your coding, and if you use a wysiwyg editor you often can't control that at all. SimpleTidy is a utility that you apply to your web pages to make them fully compliant. We checked the results and found that even some of the messiest, non-standard code turned into a pristine document. The program also reformats and indents code that may have been shuffled around, especially from a wysiwyg editor. While a hand-coder would probably state that such a utility is not needed, not everyone is an expert, or even a coder, and such a tool as this goes a long way to creating clean sites that function properly. |
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