The Free Website Project

With all the fancy CSS, Javascript, and Flash on the web today, we sometimes forget that most websites are still built on good old HTML 4.0. If you’d like to design webpages that look nice and work well, you’ll be spending a lot of hands-on time working with the language. These online tools can help make that easier, without the need to ever download anything:

1. Real Time HTML Editor - This deceptively-simple AJAX tool is nothing short of amazing! By cleverly making your browser do all the work, it is able to support embedded CSS, JavaScript, and much more almost instantly. This makes it more than adequate for most projects, and a really valuable tool in your arsenal, but be sure to validate it to catch any errors!

2. CSS HTML Code Generator - If writing everything from scratch isn’t your thing, this generator will lay down the framework for an HTML page by dealing with background image tags, title, and simple paragraph formatting. It’s not a WYSIWYG, but it serves up fairly clean HTML mixed with CSS to start you off. This site and this one do much the same thing.

3. Embedded Media HTML Generator - When you have no idea how to embed a Flash, Real, QuickTime, or Windows Media object into your page, this generator from the folks at CIT can come to your rescue! If only more media types were supported, this one might make the top of the list.

4. W3C Markup Validator - You’ll find a lot of page validators on the web, but this is the most trusted, most official, and probably the pickiest. Even if your spacer GIFs don’t have alternate text, it’s still a good habit to paste in your URL or source here and check for errors. This ensures that your page design will be accessible to a wider audience and will hopefully show up well in all modern browsers.

5. HTML -> Script Converter - This little tool can convert your HTML code to PHP, JavaScript, or ASP. It’s simple, but great for when you’ve got to embed some HTML into a script you’re working on. Be aware that it doesn’t actually change the tags, just embeds them in a way that the script will spit out that code to your browser.

6. Image -> HTML Converter - If you’re a true computer guy, nothing beats a little good ol’ ASCII art, which is why this website converts an image into colored text. If you can’t visualize what I"m talking about, you’ve never played an old DOS game. Give it a try, you might be surprised!

7. PDF -> HTML Converter - Next time you need to quote a PDF or make it more accessible, don’t wait for Google to index it for you! Instead, paste the URL into this little gem from Adobe and let them do the work. Unfortunately, it seems they’ll want your reasons for converting it, but that’s a small price to pay.

8. PDF Online Converter - Oops! I just converted a PDF to HTML file and then deleted the PDF, but I want it back with slightly different formatting? Never fear, the PDF Online Converter is here! From this site you can convert several different types of documents to PDF, and just one of those is HTML. Definitely worth bookmarking!

9. Code -> HTML Converter - Here you can convert your favorite programming language into pure HTML without downloading anything. I don’t know to what extent the other languages are supported, but it seems to convert HTML to itself pretty well .

10. Strip HTML Tags - Finally given up on HTML? While barely more than a piece of PHP example code, this can actually be pretty useful. Just be aware that it’s going to make things difficult to find, so it’s usually better to copy and paste text.

I hope you’ve found this list to be a helpful resource. If you’ve got something to share, don’t hesitate to leave a comment!