Zen Coding
If you write HTML for a living, and you don't know Zen Coding yet, you are missing out big time.
Zen Coding is build as a plugin for commonly used editors (including Notepad++, yey!) that allows you to write HTML, CSS and XML code 20 time faster. So writing:
1 | html:xt>div#header>div#logo+ul#nav>li.item-$*5>a |
with a keystroke converts to:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 | < !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" /> <title></title> </head> <body> <div id="header"> <div id="logo"></div> <ul id="nav"> <li class="item-1"><a href=""></a></li> <li class="item-2"><a href=""></a></li> <li class="item-3"><a href=""></a></li> <li class="item-4"><a href=""></a></li> <li class="item-5"><a href=""></a></li> </ul> </div> </body> </html> |
Don't get this wrong, like the man said, "The purpose of ZC is not to write a full HTML page with a single line, but to help you write smaller code chunks.". Here is a video introducing the system in further detail.
It is easier than it looks actually, and looking a bit over the syntax will make total sense. Printing the cheat sheet also helps :)
Also worth noticing that in Notepad++ (the only one I tried) the plugin added few more functions that help with the coding that I'm sure you'll enjoy (Jumping to the edit points is a God given). This project inspired another neat tool for PHP developers to output HTML using this syntax from code. You can find more here
I have only touched briefly on what it can do but I will certainly not author another single HTML document without the benefit of Zen Coding.