Thinking of moving from Windows desktop to Linux (Mint) ditto. Would I be able to continue to program in html for the internet ? Would I be able to output material on disk which could be read by computers with Windows operating systems ? What about email to such computers ?

Welcome to the Forums. Linux Mint is quite popular, you will find many advantages to it. Can you explain more about your workflow? Depending on how you plan to work, there are different tips to save time and effort.

I don't personally know people who try to do HTML work on Windows. Normally, people use Linux or OS X for that, I've seen. So I guess that answers the general question: yes you can do XHTML on Linux. XHTML and CSS are after all just standards and thus independent of the platform you are working on or else something has gone really wrong. About programming, XHTML is a markup language, though, so it's not a programming language or even related to one. Do you mean working with PHP, Perl, Python, or Java Server Pages? If so, then yes, programming is easy on Linux.

About reading disks with Windows, can you elaborated? External drives and USB-sticks can be formatted with outdated file systems like FAT32 or NTFS and they can then be carried over to Windows machines and read from them. Alternately directories or even whole partitions can be shared over the network. If all your machines are on the same LAN then you have Samba which provides SMB/CIFS. If the machines must connect over the Internet, then you can share files using SSHFS. If the machines must connect over the Internet and you have a large, distributed business, then OpenAFS might be worth a look. However, regardless of how you share the files, the important part is that you have a common format. In your case XHTML would work because even Windows applications can read it.

E-mail is similar. It is standards based and thus you have a choice of applications with which to read or write e-mail. Or you can use a webmail interface, in many cases. Thunderbird is a good choice and others like Sylpheed. There are also hard core Mutt users. If you are connecting to an M$ Exchange server instead of an e-mail server, then you will have to have the sysadmin of the server turn on IMAPS for you.

Thank you for the reply. Can you recommend a book which answers these kinds of simple questions about Linux operating systems ?

Samix

Well, there are some general books about GNU/Linux but they are not specific to any particular task:

http://linuxcommand.org/tlcl.php
http://www.linurs.org/linux/Linux.pdf

However, there are some variations between distros regarding the GUI and the GUI-based tools. They are fast moving targets and hard for books to keep up with them. You might look at some that are specific to your choice of distro (Linux Mint) which are not only more specific but also kept more up to date:

https://www.linuxmint.com/documentation.php

Emacs (an IDE and editor) is hard to beat for a lot of tasks, such as XHTML work, but has a bit of a learning curve. It's worth the investment in learning but you might look at Bluefish or BlueGriffon, too, if you are just starting.

Maybe you have some more detailed questions to help us focus answers?

HTML is its own set of standards that are platform agnostic. You can certainly write HTML on Linux.

The question becomes, are you using proprietary tools that work only on Windows to do your development? You will not get Adobe development tools, for example, to run on Linux, as Adobe does not support Linux.

This article will tell you more about Linux development tools. And, of course, there always text editors. Many Linux text editors include the capability of working in various mark-up languages.

I stopped using javascript several years ago, but still create pages using HTML and XHTML with CSS. I use vi (or gvim) on both windows and linux for page development.

I may be atypical, but my point is that there is nothing at all about web development that makes it (somehow magically?) prefer to have been developed on any particular operating system. You could do your development on FreeDOS, CP/M, Linux, BSD, or any other operating system that has tools and some kind of network presence that allows you to move the product to a web server. Many more pages and sites are developed on Linux than on Windows, but that is because more developers prefer Linux, and more web servers are Linux based.