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Using Netscape Composer 4.8 as your html editor
     Programs
     HTML file structure
     Images
     Formatting
          Other formats
          Notes on wysiwyg
     Tables
     Spell checker
     File structure on local drive
     How to start editor
     What version of Netscape Composer?
     Getting online
     An index start page

Examples of pages edited with Netscape Composer 4.8
     How my table based opening (index) page is displayed in five browsers
          Here's the view of the index page in Composer
     Example of massive complex table
     Multiple side-by-side images
     Beautiful hires images

Intro
       Can a non-programmer set up and run his own big web site. Yes, indeed.

        While I am a retired engineer and know a little about html code, I am not a programmer. Yet I have been running my own web site for over 15 years. I have written over 75 original essays, some over 100 pages long, filled with text, images and tables. I do all my writing in a simple, yet powerful, classic html wysiwyg editor that shields me from having to know anything about the underlying html code. This html editor originated with the Netscape team, authors of first popular web browser introduced in the late 1990s, the Netscape Navigator. The Netscape team used Composer, a wysiwyg editor they had written, to write the Netscape browser. The editor was thrown in when you downloaded the full Netcape suite of programs. So it was free then, and it remains free today.

        This editor is old since it was written in the late 1990s. Does the html code it outputs still work? Yes indeed! I don't know of a single problem with the output code. The web's html code was codified by the time of the so-called 'browser wars' pitting Netscape Navigator against upstart Microsoft's Internet Explorer in the late 1990s. Later features like javascript, HTML5, and style sheet are basically add ons.

        The fact that the editor is old is in fact a huge advantage. It makes it dead simple to learn and use specifically because it is missing all the complexities that have accumulated in web coding in the last twenty years, complexities that make it near impossible for a non-programmer to figure out how to use new html editors that supports all this stuff. I just took a look at what was available today in free html editors, and I was boggled by their complexity. With Netscape Composer you write text add images and tables and save it to your hard drive. How hard is that?

        There is a second advantage to the provenance of Netscape Composer. While it is simple to use, it is powerful. It was used to write popular Netscape browser. Its table support is extensive. Also because it was extensively used by the Netscape team, it is virtually bug free, a big plus. Add to this the fact that its built-in spell checker is the best I have ever seen.

        This wysiwyg html editor provides free form support for text, images, and tables, plus support for backgrounds, colors, fonts, spell checking, support for a variety of image types, ability to rescale images and add descriptive text to image properties (for search engines). You can add .pdf documents into the document too. What else do you need? I don't need (or want) any more than this. Right now I am writing this essay with my Netscape Composer html editor.

Programs
        I use these two programs to run my homepage, both are available free online.

         Netscape 4.8 Composer          html wysiwyg editor included with the full Netscape 4.8 brower suite
         CoffeeCup Free FTP              sets up a file transfer protocol link between your computer and a computer
                                                                at your online provider

HTML file structure
        If you look at the files created by this editor (or any html editor), what you find is an xxxxxx.htm file and typically a bunch of  image files (.jpg, .gif, or .png) one for each image in the document. This is because the web's html code is structured so that all the text and tables and formatting in a document are contained within a single file: xxxxxx.htm or xxxxxx.html. This file also contains the links to all the images in the file. Just put the .htm file and all the images in the same directory and everything works.

                xxxxxx.htm              (text and tables with links to the image files)
                    image1.jpg
                    image2.gif
                    image3.png

        A check of my upload directory shows it contains over 3,000 files that make up my 75+ essays. Yet things work well. I suspect professional programmers are probably appalled by this. For them document control is important as they typically work in teams, but for a personal home page I think it's fine. (I will admit though that a few years ago I switched my root hard drives to solid state to reduce wait times. I also put some essays that are picture rich into a separate subdirectory, the only subdirectory I have.)

        I never have to concern myself with the underlying html code. I write in english in the html editor, the html editor outputs the html code that browsers know how to interpret. It's that simple. You don't need any programming skills to do this.

Images
        Netscape composer allows you add images (inline) and rescale them when they are entered. The three popular image types are supported .jpg, .gif, and .png. (And who know maybe other images types are supported, I have not experimented, but I know these three types are supported, because I use all three.) It took me a while to realize that if you want search engines to 'find' your individual images, it is best to embed in the image properties some descriptive text, and Netscape Composer allows this.

        Is it possible to pour text around images? Frankly I don't know and don't care. I just put the images in line with text. With smaller images I put multiple images on the same row, separated by periods so they display separately. Maybe it could be a little more polished, but I think the look of my essays is fine. Keep it simple stupid (Kiss) is my motto.

Image trick
        One issue with images is that muliple images can end up side by side touching. This sometimes makes it difficult to manipulate them. One little trick I have learned is to put a period after each image is inserted. This keeps the images separated in the editor and has the further advantage that with multiple images side-by-side images on the same row the browser is forced to display the images separately.

        The editor has built in support for paragraphs, bullets and lists. Maybe fine for teaching in the classroom to write a functional web page in an hour, but I don't use any of this. I don't want the editor 'helping' me. I just want to write on a blank piece of screen free form. However, I do find the editor's 'align' feature (left, center, right) very helpful in positioning images and tables and giving document some visual character. Also I like the 'indent' feature for text and use it a lot as it give the text some character and avoids the boring block text look I see in so many non-commercial web pages.

        My eyesight is not what it was when I was younger, so one 'trick' I use to make writing easier is set the font size higher while writing and editing, then at the end reduce it so the text will look good in a browser. (Because of the age of this program the common windows browser screen enlarge technique of ctrl/mouse wheel does not work.)

Other formats
        It's not problem to add in .pdf documents inline within the editor. I have done this in several essays where for various reasons the original document was prepared in the .pdf format. Also while music files (.mp3) cannot be embedded, they can be linked to. Now writing this essay I took a look at the Netscape composer files, and I am surprised that I do see a javascript subdirectory, so apparently there is some support for javascript (but circa twenty years ago!). I have no interest in this, I don't want or need javascript for my homepage.

Notes on wysiwyg
        Composer is described by Netscape as a wysiwyg html editor. What does wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) really mean in the context of an old browser?  Composer pages display accurately in the Netscape browser. [Under 'file' select 'Browse Page' to see a document in the Netscape browser, and in the browser select 'file', 'Edit Page' to go back to Composer.]

        However, the Netscape 4.8 browser is more than 20 years old and cannot handle the code of many modern web sites correctly. Does this matter? No. We are not using the Netscape browser. Our concern is with the Netscape html editor Composer, and it doesn't matter that the Netscape browser can't handle the code of many modern web sites. Not that it really matters, but the Netscape 4.8 browser (Navigator) will always correctly display the code produced by Netscape 4.8 html editor Composer because the two of them were created together.

        Look at the opening page of my web site: Twinkle Toes Engineering. It is structured as two columns with color highlighting. But the version of Netscape Composer I am using doesn't support two columns, so how was this done? In the editor (see below) the opening page can be seen to be a bunch of tables with the table boundaries set to zero. Browser don't show a zero width table boundary, so the underlying table formatting becomes invisible. A neat trick that I learned only recently.

        Pulling data into tables and color coding the table entries provides a good way both to high light key data and leaven the look of the text so it is less boring. I use tables a lot.

Spell checker
        Another of the glories of the Netscape Composer is it's spell checker. It's recommendations are nearly always correct. It is the best I have ever seen. The spell checker in my version of Netscape requires me to high light the text I want to spell check, and then it steps through the high lighted text. This is far preferable to a spell checker that can only check whole document. I discovered some versions of Netscape Composer later than 4.8 have this limitation, and it is crippling. When you have just added a few paragraphs to a hundred page document and want to spell check them, it soon become clear why spell checking from the beginning is not the way to go. To be practical the spell checker has to be able to spell check only selected text when a document is of any significant length.

File structure on local drive
        By modern standard Netscape Composer is a small program. 'Netsape 4.8' directory installed in the c:\ root. The size of this directory only 25 meg, and this includes the editor, spell checker, everything. The Netscape Composer editor (netscape.exe) is 5 mbytes and the spell checker database is 700 kbytes.

        It looks like everything is in this directory. My guess is that like many older windows programs it probably does not need to be installed, just copied over, but I have not verified this. It is important that everything about Netscape Composer is local on your hard drive. Going out to fetch something from online 'Netscape' pages is a fools errand. After twenty years, nearly all these old Netscape sites are dead (or radically changed).

How to start editor
        The start of Composer is a little hidden. When you click on Netscape, it typically starts in the Netscape brower, so it can open and display any html file. To edit this file in the browser look under 'file' (upper left corner of toolbar) and you will see an entry called 'Edit Page'. Click this and it drops you into the editor, Composer. This change in progam is indicated by a change in icon in the upper left corner. There's another way to get to Composer. When you open an html file in Netscape, the open file box will ask you if you if you want to open the file in Netscape (browser) or Composer (editor).

What version of Netscape Composer?
        Now we come to the one sticky wicket with this editor. What version of Composer is best and how to obtain it? I use and recommend Composer 4.8 the version of the html editor that was supplied with (full) Netscape 4.8 browser suite. There is a long revision history with the Netscape browser, and when Netscape died and the code was publically released other companies took over the code (and the html editor), and it eventually evolved into Mozilla Firefox browser. So there is a wide range of revisions of the Netscape Composer and its sucessors out there. A search for 'Netscape 4.8' will bring up various archival sites that support downloading.

        A few years ago I did some downloading of different Netscape versions to check some of them out and settled on Netscape 4.8 as the best. I was surprised to see that some of the versions had a weird problem that was easy to miss on a quick look. The spell checker was either missing or it didn't work right. To work with big files the spell check has to be set to spell check only selected text, not start from the beginning of the document each time. This maybe tolerable if you have say only short documents, but not if you have 100 pages. This is obviously a little (but crippling) bug and tells me that as a later generation of programmers took over the code bugs got introduced.

        Another source to check out for a version of Composer is a site called SeaMonkey. Below is how they introduce their site in 2017. I am passing this information on, but I have not downloaded any of their stuff, so I have no idea of their editor's features or quality.

        "The SeaMonkey project is a community effort to develop the SeaMonkey all-in-one internet application suite. Such a software suite was previously made popular by Netscape and Mozilla, and the SeaMonkey project continues to develop and deliver high-quality updates to this concept. Containing an Internet browser, email & newsgroup client with an included web feed reader, HTML editor, IRC chat and web development tools, SeaMonkey is sure to appeal to advanced users, web developers and corporate users.

        Under the hood, SeaMonkey uses much of the same Mozilla source code which powers such successful siblings as Firefox and Thunderbird. Legal backing is provided by the Mozilla Foundation."

SeaMonkey Composer
        "SeaMonkey's powerful yet simple HTML editor keeps getting better with dynamic image and table resizing, quick insert and delete of table cells, improved CSS support, and support for positioned layers. For all your documents and website projects, Composer is all you need."

        To get online you need to do three things.

        One, you need to select an online provider where your code will reside. I selected GoDaddy only because I knew they were big after seeing they had a commercial in the superbowl. The last thing I want is for my online provider to go bankrupt. So I opened an account there and paid then the fee just for hosting, ignoring all the beginner 'help' programs they wanted to sell me. Wtih Netscape 4.8 Composer as my editor and CoffeeCup FTP for my file transfer, I don't need no stinken help from GoDaddy.

        Two, you need to select and buy an available URL (a public web address). Sites online that sell URLs all include a way to search for what URLs are in use and what are available. With all the added extensions to URLs approved in recent years there are lots of URL choices. I chose the relatively uncommon extension .info. URL's are available from various providers, but the easiest thing to do I think is buy the URL from your online provider. This is what I did [Twinkle Toes Engineering <=> twinkletoesengineering.info]. The cost of the URL for a decade or so rental was in the few hundred dollar range.

        The 3rd step is to copy your html code with the associated images from your hard drive up to the online provider's hard drive. Obviously you want to retain your original files on your hard drive. This is the master of your homepage. There are several ways to do this, there is even some support built into Netscape for this, but I have always done it with a separate file transfer program that sets up an FTP link (file transfer link) between the two computers. I use a free program from CoffeeCup software called [CoffeeCup Free FTP]. Once this FTP program is set up (this is a little techy), it is very simple to use. It opens with a split screen of two directories, one of your local hard drive showing your files and the other of the directory at the online provider (in my case at GoDaddy) showing the directory there into which your files are to go. It is then simply a matter of using standard windows file techniques to copy files from one computer to the other. You can also delete and rename files on the online provider's hard drive just as on your local hard drives. Very simple. The online provider will associate your URL with the files of your account, and you are online, That's all there is to it.

        Of course you probably want your documents to be locatable with a search engine. Sit tight and wait for a spider from a search engine to find your stuff. I have no idea what criteria they use to include sites, but I find that a new essay of mine usually shows up in a Google search in less than a week.

An index start page
        When you have multiple essays, there is one more file you need to generate, a start page for your site. Following an old protocol this special file is named 'index.html' and included with the other html files. The online provider looks for this file, and when someone enters your URL, this is the file which the online provider will display. It sets the tone for your site and links to other essays on your site, each of which has its own secondary URL. I am not sure if this naming is overly restrictive. I started doing it this way many years ago and see no need to change because it just works. I also follow the convention of naming my files in lower case with no spaces, which in the early days was recommended.
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How my table based opening (index) page is displayed in five browsers
        Here is how my homepage opens in five major browsers. First the current top browers, Chrome from Google and Firefox from Mozilla and the lesser known Opera, which I have used for years and is independent, but now licenses its rendering engine from Mozilla. I also have included two older top browsers that are still available, but are no longer supported: Internet Explorer from Microsoft and Safari for windows from Apple. In each case I ran the browser full screen and reduced its magnification to show a little more page than it normally would. Also I cropped the sides and top.

        The overall look of the Composer start (index) page is the same in all the five browsers. In all the browsers the basic two column, table based Composer formatting with all the associated links and colors are rendered the same. In all the browsers the table boundaries set at zero width are not displayed, so the underlying table structure is not visible. Very clean. Use of tables to simulate two columns works well. A closer link shows some minor variations in how the various browser rendering engines work. For example look at the two links in the table at the top. In Chrome they are not on the same line (Wind Turbines is higher than Photosynthesis), but in Firefox they are. I have no problem with this. This is the nature of how browsers with their very complex rendering engines display html code. To get the polished look of most large commercial sites where they want exact control of the look of each page plus support for phone/tablet hoz/vert displays requires a whole different type of coding about which I know essentially nothing because I am not an IT guy. For what I want to do the Netscape Composer suits me just fine, all the browser have no real problems rendering the html code it outputs.

        The only difference in these pages that catches my eye is a color intensity variation in the boundary around the title: Twinkle Toes Engineering. This is a very, very minor difference in rendering. While it is apparent here in a head to head comparison, in practical terms it means nothing. Also I knew I was pushing the envelope in Composer with cell boundaries to get a 3d effect.  I knew when I first tested it that it didn't display the same in all brewers, but I liked the 3d effect, so I left it in.
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Below is my index page as displayed in major browers: Chrome from Google, Firefox from Mozilla and Opera (modified Mozilla code).

        When I discovered that by setting the width of a table boundary to zero that underlying table structure was not visible in a browser, I began experimenting to see what I could do. Could I put tables inside tables? Yes. Could I put links and text inside tables? Yes. Could I align the links and text in two columns using two tables side by side. Yes. I also wanted to group my essays by function and put in some color high lighting so I played around a lot to get the look I wanted. Experimenting I found more smaller tables worked better than fewer larger tables, more smaller tables gave me more control of the look of the page. The dotted lines show the tables boundaries. Here you can see that my start page is actually made up of 20 to 30 tables. The links and text describing the essays are all inside the tables. Some tables are just for a category title, some tables are just place holders with no content. My double rows of tables are actually inside a bigger outer table indicated by an outer dotted line. This outer table allowed me to set the percent of the screen width that the start page will occupy.

        I found there were some very minor formatting aspects that I could not control because various browsers rendered differently. For example in the Composer's display the text line near the top starting with "MIT" is against the table boundary, but only one browser displays it this way, most throw in a space.

        Normally with a wysiwyg editor like Composer the guts like this don't show, but the opening page, which must link with some descriptive text to more than 75 of my essays, is a special case. I put a lot of work into it. The result I think is far more compact than any standard indexing I see on other sites. I was pleased that Composer was able to do the job.

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Example of massive complex table
        Here's a view of a massive complex table that I continually update to include all my cancer blood tracking data. This table has a wide variety of cell sizes and cell colors. Since this table extends over many screens, this is just a partial look at it. You can see it has 16 columns. The entries in each cell are centered. I wanted to subdivide the columns into more important and less important categories, so the color of a center cell is set to dark blue. The cell is narrow because I don't put any text into it. The height of each row is automatically adjusted by Composer depending on how much text write. To get a header for all the columns when I change chemo, on a new row I delete 15 of the 16 columns leaving me with a single cell. I write my text in this cell and assign it a new color (here green) so it stands out.

Multiple side-by-side images
        As I import images, if the images are to be side-by-side on the same row I generally try to adjust their heights to be the same. It takes a little extra time, but it just looks better, giving the essay a more polished look. To scale the images in Composer you just grab the corner or boundaries and pull. But sometimes nature of the images demands unequal heights, as these two examples below show.

Beautiful hires images
        I like to include beautiful images in my essays. From a theater essay (Awake and Sing III) here is a nice, nearly full width image of the Boston Ballet corp. You can include images in Composer that are wider than the screen too, but they require the user to either right/left scroll or reduce the magnification in the browser.