Emerging tools for the modern web producer

[weegillis]

One cannot be anything less than astounded when looking at how much the software development mindset has changed over the past quarter century. Would it were hobbyists had code that could write code from their ideas. Today we have it, and to help it along, new extensions of the old HTML and CSS specifications, and a much more robust DOM.

The [how do you describe them adjective] folks who are at the center of the process are also mindful enough to the degree of importance that must be afforded getting this right for users the first time to have created online (or purchasable) tools that demonstrate and generate code to output what the user has created from the tool.

How easy is that. And from just studying the outputted code, we get to learn some more CSS3. It helps us all fall into the groove of standardization, at least to some extent. We all know the sky is the limit, and reaching for it will always put one's self out of bounds.

Expect new tools along the lines of The Semantic Web to emerge, as HTML5 is all about semantics, if anything. Soon there will be validators that evaluate the semantics of your web pages, making it easier to prepare them for search. The search engines are going to thrive on this technology being propagated across the entire web, not just on their own servers.

We are well aware that a large part of the web is visual, and visual tools for print have in recent years taken on a uniquely web-centric appearance, so much so that web-to-print has emerged to challenge the print first mentality of the past generation. Leading edge software is gearing up to be able to render dynamic pages straight to the press at the click of a mouse. The news that's on the web will make it's way into print, just like that. It's smart technologies that have speared this on, and it is by way of the emerging HTML and CSS specs, proprietary or otherwise, all light weight, that the web can afford to scale up the amount of information it can network and store.

So to make this introductory post more of an introduction than an essay, may we have the first tool, please?

No. 1 tool of the web, CSS3 Generator. I didn't make up the intro, that's quoting their page. It deserves first billing, all the same since it deals with age old design issues at the core of 'the old web': Rounded corners, box shadows, gradient backgrounds and opacity. The grandfather of CSS3 tools.

[mikmik]

Initializr is an HTML5 templates generator. It lets you configure what script support you want like modernizer and IEshiv, and other. From the site: "Initializr will generate for you a clean customizable template based on Boilerplate with just what you need to start."