A GUI editor allows you to design web pages by drawing objects on the screen with the mouse, and placing objects such as buttons and images with a mouse click on the page. They are WYSIWYG - What you see is what you get! The editor gives full control over fonts, images, frames, hyperlinks, tables, input elements etc.

The editor then turns your screen into HTML code. Having designed the screen, the GUI editor lets you preview it in any browser. There is usually a "Publish to the web" feature that lets you upload the web site as a whole to a folder on a web-hosting site ("one click publishing"). Developers often upload pages to a test server before moving them to the real server. The test server should be as like the real thing as possible (same operating system, same web server software, same CGI interpreter).

• Page editors (such as Netscape Composer and Microsoft Front Page Express) let you design individual pages.
• Web site manager (such as Macromedia Dreamweaver 8.0 and Adobe GoLive) let you manage entire web sites: creating web pages, managing links between them, full control of site structure etc.

W3C Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines

This is a standard recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium that ensures that GUI tools are suitable for developers with disabilities. Here are the guidelines in order:

1. Support accessible authoring practices.
2. Generate standard mark-up language.
3. Support the creation of accessible content.
4. Provide ways of checking and correcting inaccessible content.
5. Integrate accessibility solutions into overall look and feel.
6. Promote accessibility in help and documentation.
7. Ensure that the authoring tool is accessible to authors with disabilities.

GUI editors provide a quick and easy way of creating HTML code. Some things like determining co-ordinates for image maps is a right !*$%*! to do manually! However, the code that GUI editors produce is often convoluted and difficult to understand.

Writing HTML code manually provides complete control and is important if you want a particular effect that GUIs won't let you do. Although GUIs generally let you change code manually, some alter or ignore your changes. A sound knowledge of HTML is vital if you are going to advance to JavaScript or other scripting languages.

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