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Fellow MacOpinion columnist Marc Zeedar has released a very cool little freeware HTML editor called Cobweb to compliment his also very cool Z-Write non-linear word processor for creative writers.

Cobweb is a non-WYSIWYG HTML text editor -- my favorite sort. It is designed to work as a companion to Z-Write, but may be used by anyone needing a simple HTML editor.

I downloaded Cobweb in the wee hours of this morning, and have been playing with it a bit. in fact I'm using it to HTML-ize this article. So far it's great. It's a bit of an adjustment from my usual HTML editing application -- Tex Edit Plus tweaked with more than a dozen custom AppleScripts for HTML markup, and it comparitively has both advantages and disadvantages. If Z-Write/Cobweb supported AppleScript and had text-cleaning features the way Tex Edit does, it would be a dream application. I digress.

Oh, BTW, Cobweb works fine with HTML conversions created by Tex Edit AppleScripts, and presumably any HTML document.

Cobweb includes special features for editing Z-Write 1.2 HTML Template files, which allow the user to customize Z-Write's HTML output. Z-Write 1.2 will be released in March.

Cobweb's key features include:
- Simple, elegant design
- Smart toolbar: inserts HTML tags in context - Syntax coloring
- Support for most basic HTML commands
- Supports fontsets, for use with the FONT tag - Support for 216-color web palette, tables, and images
- Multiple undos
- Free

A couple of initial observations:

HTML produced by Z-Write/Cobweb still requires a bullet conversion to the < &#149;> tag, in order to convert bullets from pasted-in text to browser compatible html. It will bullet non-formatted lists with the <li> tag formatting if they are not already bulleted.

Even though Netscape is selected as my default browser in my Internet control panel, Cobweb insists on previewing pages in Internet Explorer, whose installer I have on my hard drive, but which is currently uninstalled, making the preview function useless to me. If there's a workaround to this, Marc, preferably to iCab, please let me know.

There is a bad bug in the "Insert Link" command that makes it useles for marking up highlighted URLs. It drops an extra <"> in anchor tags and places it in front of the a leading URL carat as shown (this is a bad link for illustration):
http://www.stonetablesoftware.com/z-write.html

[CORRECTION: I did read through the manual quickly last night, but missed the bit about the Option key in this paragraph:

"Then there's the Insert Link button. It inserts a blank hypertext link tag like this: if you have nothing selected, an end tag if you click it with the Option key down, and it frames your text between the tags if you have text selected, like this."

My apologies to Marc for my erroneous comment. CM]

System requirements:
Cobweb requires a Power Macintosh, Quicktime, and Mac OS 7.5 or better.

Cobweb is free for downloading from the Stone Table Software website:
http://www.stonetablesoftware.com/cobweb.html

About Z-Write

Z-Write is the world's first "non-linear" word processor. Its revolutionary approach lets you store multiple documents in a single file. This allows you to easily manage hundreds of notes, revisions, ideas, chapters, and other bits of writing in a non-linear fashion, yet unlike a personal information manager, Z-Write is real word processor, designed for handling huge novels and complicated research projects. At just USD $20, it is an essential part of every writer's toolkit.

More information about Z-Write may be found at:
http://www.stonetablesoftware.com/z-write.html

For my full review of Z-Write, visit:
http://www.applelinks.com/mooresviews/zwrite.shtml

Charles W. Moore

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