Screem 0.17.1 review

SCREEM is a web development environment

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: David A Knight

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SCREEM is a web development environment. Screem purpose is to increase productivity when constructing a site, by providing quick access to commonly used features. While it is written for use with the GNOME desktop environment in mind it does not specifically require you to be running it, just have the libraries installed.

Unlike most other web site / HTML editors SCREEM does not provide a WYSIWYG display of pages. Instead you are presented with the raw html source in its editor window.

In general WYSIWYG editors do not produce good clean valid HTML, and can also slow you down if they do not support an element that you wish to insert. By utilising a text based editing system you can use the markup you want rather than what the application thinks you need, and also provide quick access to commonly used elements via toolbar buttons which insert the markup at the current cursor position.

In addition to excelling as an HTML editor, SCREEM also lends itself to being a versatile XML editing package, perfect for use as a general purpose structured data editing environment.

Here are some key features of "SCREEM":
Page Previewing

Although not a WYSIWYG editor SCREEM provides a view by which you can see what your page(s) may look like in a browser. Of course the exact look depends on which browser is in use. If the internal preview isn't sufficient then up to four external browsers are supported, three customisable ones, and the default GNOME HTTP handler.

Syntax Highlighting

As you would expect there is support in the editor for syntax highlighting, to allow easy identification, at a glance, of what HTML is present. This is of course customisable via the application preferences to whatever colours you like, or even more so by editing the XML syntax files to highlight the patterns you want.

DTD/Doctype Parsing

This is one of the more powerful features of SCREEM, the ability to identify which doctype a page is using, and process the DTD file. This is then used in other features to provide you with the valid tags and attributes for that style of document. As such SCREEM supports WML, Docbook or any other SGML / XML based language, as well as the expected HTML.

Inline Tagging

Inline Tagging is the act of displaying a popup menu showing the valid attributes while typing in a tag. For instance typing