Web Development Tools
Intro
This is not an exhaustive list and only focuses on free and open source tools for web development. For a larger list focusing on multimedia production, see the FOSSArts page.
Text Editors
Text editors allow you to type code (XHTML, PHP, C, Python, etc) and save the file in text format with the appropriate file extension. Some are very basic, others have features like Syntax highlighting (so when you type a tag or function it turns to a color different than the rest of your text), some have auto completion of certain function names and tags, etc. Note that although applications such as MS Word allow you to type text, by default they save the file in a special format which will NOT work for coding. There are MANY text editors available. Here are a few open source text editors which you might want to try:
Graphics
There are many open source applications for Graphics and you may want to spend some time trying them out. At minimum, you will probably want a image editor of some type (something like Photoshop) and a drawing program (something like Illustrator). Here are two applications for just those purposes:
Multi Purpose
- Firefox Web Developer Plugin - This cross platform plugin for for Firefox is really awesome. It has a ton of features including xhtml and css validation, outline of block elements, tools for Javascript and DOM inspection, and inline XHTML and CSS editing allowing you to experiment with any page.