Products mentioned:
FrontPage (Win9x/NT/2000/XP)
Macromedia Dreamweaver (Win/Mac)
Allaire HomeSite (Win)
PageMill (Win/Mac) (discontinued!)
BBEdit (Mac)
PageSpinner (Mac)
Myrmidon (Mac)
BeyondPress (Mac)
Advanzio Creatoré DB Publishing (updated)
Removed and discontinued:
Product: FrontPage (versions 2000 and 2002 tested)
From: Microsoft
For: Windows 95/NT/2000
Pros: Easy to use and very full-featured, with site management tools, a web-server, graphics and GIF animation editors, HTML editor (with WYSIWYG and "Raw" HTML modes, CGI and CSS support) and much more. Wizards and Templates allow you to change the look of a website or page with a few clicks. Supports frames and tables. Imports existing websites. Server extensions are unnecessary for basic editor operation. FrontPage is probably the fastest way to edit web pages currently on the market.
Cons: Some functions require Microsoft server extensions (Windows and Unix host extensions are provided). Program changes <center> tags to <p align=center>, adds <div> tags and makes other unwanted changes that can negatively affect many layouts. Complex table layouts may be imported incorrectly. The Sort Oldest<>Newest feature in Discussion Web did not work in our tests of the product. (www.bugnet.com confirms this bug.)
Strongest Competitor: Macromedia Dreamweaver.
Like most Microsoft products, FrontPage is a product you'll either love or hate. (For us, it is a bit of a both.) We love the ease and speed with which we can now create and edit graphically rich web pages. Now that Internet Explorer 6.x is the dominant web browser in the marketplace, we love the program's extensive support of tables, frames, cascading style sheets, color, fonts and other advanced attributes. We hate the editor's continued insistence in forcing its own HTML idiosyncrasies on our design efforts. But we use it and it works very reliably (the DiscussionWeb bug noted above notwithstanding) and provides the features we need at a competitive price. Apparently, we aren't alone. FrontPage is the market leader in HTML editors, ahead of Netscape's Composer, Adobe's (now-discontinued) PageMill, Allaire HomeSite and the popular Dreamweaver from Macromedia.
FrontPage 2000 fixed a few complaints we'd had with FrontPage 98. Most notably, the program is able to more easily wrap text around placed images, and its real-time spelling checker is a godsend. FrontPage 2000 is much better than previous versions at not messing up the look of your pages when it fiddles with your HTML code, although it still replaces Netscape-specific tags like <center> with the more browser-neutral <p align=center> whether you want it to or not. As with many Microsoft programs, some people find such meddling intrusive, but we find it greatly speeds up our web page editing and helps make pages that work better with all browsers. FrontPage 2000 has a native HTML editing mode, and full support for colored tables, CSS styles sheets and frames as well.
FrontPage 2002 ( available as a standalone product, or as part of the Office XP Premium and Developer editions) further enhances the program's usefulness by adding the ability to paste with or without formatting. There are a number of other small enhancements, but this is the one killer feature that makes it a must-have upgrade for those who do a lot of cut-and-paste page edits.
At one time, Netscape Composer (part of the Communicator suite) and NetObjects Fusion had been our two favorite site authoring tools in terms of speed and WYSIWYG elegance. Composer is quite limited in features compared to FrontPage, and Fusion eventually began to annoy us with its propensity to create pages that don't scale well to different resolutions. (In other words, they look best on the system that created them!) Allaire's HomeSite remains our favorite non-WYSIWYG "old school" editor, but its poor support of tables makes it increasingly onerous to use in that regard.
We are not fond of FrontPage Express (shipped as a freely downloadable optional component of Internet Explorer for Win95/NT); it is based on FrontPage 97, which was much more intrusive in its HTML modification than FrontPage 2000 (or FP98, for that matter) is. And FrontPage Express' arbitrary limitations, such as a lack of table split and merge commands (there's not even a cell height option!), frames and other many other advanced HTML features makes it unsuitable for all but the most basic pages.
Indeed, we now use FrontPage for the WYSIWYG editing of pages we've created using other tools with very good results. We've switched over to FrontPage 2002 as our primary web authoring tool (with Dreamweaver used for some tasks) here at PC Buyer's Guide.
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Product: Dreamweaver (versions 4.0 and MX tested)
From: Macromedia (a 30-day trial version is downloadable from www.macromedia.com)
Price: US$299.
Pros: Visual editing, direct HTML editing and site-wide editing in one easy to use package. Includes support for ActiveX, JavaScript, Java, Flash, ShockWave, Cold Fusion, tables, frames, etc. Table editing features are much stronger than in early versions of Dreamweaver.
Cons: Some pages display incorrectly in editor. Many shortcuts and keyboard commands are listed in manual, but nowhere else.
Strongest Competitor: Microsoft FrontPage
It is no coincidence that Macromedia was invited onstage at Steve Jobs' keynote speech at the Macworld Expo held in San Francisco in Jan. 1998. Dreamweaver is one of the most graphically sophisticated and sophisticated editors available. It also allows direct source editing, and further enhances this feature for hard-core coders by means of an included version of BBEdit on the Mac or HomeSite 3.0 on the Windows platform.
At his Macworld demo, in an fairly obvious jab at FrontPage, Macromedia spokesman Kevin Lynch stated, "Dreamweaver doesn't hose your code. It leaves your code exactly as you create it." Perhaps the best example of this we can offer you is the way it handles Cold Fusion (CFM) tags. FrontPage 2000 wrecks the page, essentially eating the tags; Dreamweaver does not. Frankly, it's not such a surprise to us that the Dreamweaver editor would leave them alone -- after all, Macromedia owns Allaire. And besides, aren't web browsers supposed to ignore tags they don't understand? We find FrontPage's aggressive behavior more bewildering, at least until someone reminds us who produced it.
Dreamweaver also provides several "code cleaning" options, including the ability to remove the XML and HTML eccentricities from Microsoft Word-produced web pages. We find this feature invaluable. Dreamweaver supports drag and drop, but more importantly, offers drag and drop creation of start and end points for Dynamic HTML animations -- very cool. Dreamweaver's Dynamic HTML is designed so that a page with animations will be displayed correctly (without plugins) under both Netscape and Internet Explorer 4.0. Flash and/or ShockWave (other Macromedia products) are also supported. Surprisingly, however, the program lacks support for embedding AVI movies -- another stubborn "not invented here" mentality, perhaps? The object code must be manually pasted into the HTML. Dreamweaver, like FrontPage, NetObjects Fusion, GoLive and a few other packages, also includes some site management capabilities, providing automatic updating of footers or other information on all pages of a site.
Using the 1.0 release of Dreamweaver, it was tricky to adjust the size of tables with borders set to "off." (Macromedia's responsive technical support staff told us how: under the View menu, you can choose to view the table borders with dotted lines - these will not show up in a web page but will allow you to more easily resize the table.) In subsequent releases, however, this function works as expected. With version 3.0 or later, you can resize the table borders by dragging them with the mouse. You can also convert tables to layers, but, after doing so, they will not resize to fit windows of different sizes. While WYSIWYG is an admirable feature in DTP packages, it has little application on the web, where designers cannot know what fonts, browsers or screen dimensions users will have.
Actually, Dreamweaver gives you a little help in some of these areas. You can specify behaviors that will work on 5.x browsers, 3.0 and 4.0 versions, or other incarnations.
Dreamweaver is a product that provides a great deal of power without sacrificing much ease of use. It's no wonder the program now has captured, as of October 31, 2000, 73% of the Mac market vs. 18% for GoLive and 8% for Fusion. (Reference: PCData). On the PC, Microsoft's aggressive pricing of FrontPage and its inclusion in some versions of MS Office have reduced its share, but its is still the major competitor to Microsoft's efforts. Dreamweaver is more expensive and feature-rich than FrontPage, making it a better choice for professional coders -- at the expense of some speed in producing basic pages. A simple page with clickable URLs or email links, for example, is much easier and quicker to produce in FrontPage. For power users, however, Dreamweaver offers some compelling features -- especially for those who want to explorer the animation potential of Dynamic HTML. We can't recommend using a plain-Jane HTML editor with tools like this around.
Trial versions are available for Windows and the Mac.
Interface: * * *
Features: * * * * *
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Product: HomeSite
From: Allaire
For: Windows 95/NT
Pros: One of the best "Raw" HTML editors, with extensive Help, CGI and CSS support, and much more. If you want total control over HTML, this might be the editor for you. Recommended for those who prefer to work with HTML code.
Cons: Complex for casual users.
Strongest Competitors: BBEdit (Mac), Hot Dog Pro (Win)
Allaire's HomeSite download page has moved since the last time we linked to it. Information on HomeSite can now be found at www.allaire.com
Product: BBedit
From: Bare Bones Software
For: Macintosh
Pros: The de facto standard "code editor" for the Macintosh, BBedit underwent some upheaval in 2003, as the company withdrew its free BBedit Lite from the market in favour of a commercial program called Text Wrangler. The subsequent outcry from the Mac user community caused the company to reconsider this decision. A more powerful commercial edition of BBedit, containing advanced search functions and other enhancements, is also available. When used as an HTML editor, BBedit provides only rudimentary benefits over a plain-text editor: code is highlighted in a different colour, a preview option allows you to open the page in the browser of your choice, and a built-in FTP feature allows to to upload or download code with ease. We use BBedit on the Mac, but frankly, only those who want total control over their "raw" code will probably want to work this way. Recommended for those who prefer to work with HTML code.
Cons: Complex for casual users.
Strongest Competitors: Text Wrangler (Mac), HomeSite, Hot Dog Pro (Win)
Product: BeyondPress
From: Astrobyte (now marketed by Extensis)
For: Mac; requires QuarkXPress 3.3+
Pros: BeyondPress 2.0 is an HTML output XTension for QuarkXPress. It handles tables, fonts, style sheets, TrueDoc and more quite elegantly (although not always accurately) and, best of all, it can output HTML documents of any length automatically from your XPress pages -- including graphics. BeyondPress was our "Our Mac Web Authoring tool of the week" pick for Oct. 17, 1997. Recommended.
Cons: Some complex layouts don't translate well.
Strongest Competitors: HexWeb (Mac)
Product: Myrmidon
From: Terry Morse
Summary: Myrmidon is a Chooser-level printer driver that outputs HTML and does a remarkably good job at retaining the formatting of original pages. Highly recommended for quick-and-(not so) dirty HTML output from QuarkXPress and other Mac applications. It was reviewed, along with other design-oriented HTML tools, in our roundup of web authoring tools for 1997. Myrmidon was our product pick for the week on Oct. 10, 1997.
Product: PageSpinner
From: Optima-system.com
For: Mac
Summary: [info supplied by vendor; we have not yet tested the latest version of this program.] PageSpinner is an easy to use, professional editor HTML editor for Mac OS supporting HTML 3.2, HTML 4, XHTML 1.0 plus additional Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer extensions .
The editor gives you quick access to often used formatting and also supports interactive help with AppleGuide and an HTML Assistant to help you compose your own Web pages.
PageSpinner is scriptable with AppleScript, making it possible to take a script-driven approach to creating and updating a site.
AppleScript-based software kits for publishing information from applications such as FileMaker Pro, 4D, Emailer and Eudora are included in the package.
Product: PageMill (discontinued)
From: Adobe
For: Mac or Windows
Pros: Adds site management facilities. Creates simple, "normalized" HTML code not likely to cause problems. CD includes Photoshop 3.05 LE, IE4, Acrobat Reader 3.01 and more.
Cons: Discontinued. No support for CSS, TrueDoc, DHTML or many other advanced features. Windows and Mac versions have different interfaces. (This could be a "plus" depending on your point of view.)
PageMill was, until its discontinuation, one of the most popular web authoring tools, at one time in second place behind Microsoft's FrontPage (with Dreamweaver nipping at its heels). Version 3 finally resurrected the missing-in-action SiteMill code Adobe purchased when it acquired PageMill from its original developers. PageMill 2, some may recall, was incompatible with the SiteMill "site management" functionality from the 1.0 release and SiteMill lay essentially dormant (while those who had bought version 1.0 waited or, in many cases, jumped ship in favor of other site-managing tools like NetObjects Fusion or FrontPage) during that time. PageMill 3.0 allows a webmaster (or even an aspiring web acolyte) to update references to changed page names automatically, scope out and easily fix broken links, and other "big picture" operations that a mere HTML editor can't handle.
This is not to say that PageMill isn't a capable web page editor -- in fact, its drag-and-drop page assembly and easy previewing functions are better than ever. For example: want to add a VRML-based multi-user 3D world to your website? We just inserted the Blaxxun VRML control object into our document, sized it by dragging it to the appropriate dimensions, and voila. The same goes for other forms of Active content, including (but mot limited to) audio, AVI, or QuickTime movies. Although PageMill 3.0 ships with QuickTime 2, we found the Windows version works well with QuickTime 3.0, too.
However, we will confess to some disappointment when we discovered that the 3.0 release still lacked support for cascading style sheets (supported by browsers since 1996), dynamic HTML, and several other current technologies. Adobe now depends upon GoLive to provide an upgrade path to tackle these tasks -- although, the company confesses, it still hasn't decided on upgrade pricing.
PageMill, for better or worse, is limited in features, but simple and easy to use (explaining, perhaps, the 45-page manual). What a concept.
Product: Creatoré DB Publishing
From: Advanzio
For: Mac
Pros: Database publishing product for publishers claims to produce complete full-color, prepress-ready output in fewer than five seconds per page from FileMaker databases. The files can be on a combination of Windows, Mac or UNIX systems.
Cons: Development status uncertain. We recently received an email from the author of this program in Feb. 2001 explaining why the program remains an obscure footnote on a few websites such as this one. Here's the text of his message, unedited.
I just performed a web crawler search, researching exactly what has been
accomplished regarding the Creatoré DB Publishing product and Advanzio's
efforts to market it. Obviously all 3 listing I found indicate the Advanzio
web site is "under construction". As the programmer behind the product... I
use to believe that but now that 15 months have passed without even a simple
cover page, I seriously doubt it!
Since I am the author of the program with over 4,000 (easily) hours invested
in it, mostly unpaid, I have an interest in moving forward without the
Advanzio blackhole marketing machine. This is very likely as I now have a
direct contact relationship with the original primary investors who are also
greatly disappointed in the lack of Advanzio marketing collateral and focus.
While we reorganize and attempt to develop a real marketing effort, I will be
handling all preliminary and technical inquires involving the DB publishing
product. We may be changing the name of the product as well, though a final
decision has not been reached. In the meantime if you would like to know more
about this database publishing technology development I have prepared a 10
page PDF program description available via FTP, the URL is:
ftp://members.aol.com/gsglink/creator.pdf
The Creatoré PDF will be temporarily incorporated in to my Golden State
Graphics web site (URL: http://members.aol.com/gsgweb) along side my other
products and pending a final decision with the primary investors.
If you have any future questions please direct them to: jimx...@aol.com
Thanks,
Jim Lewis
Golden State Graphics
13096 Blackbird St, #133
Garden Grove, CA 92843
http://members.aol.com/gsgweb
jimx...@aol.com
[Mar. 12, 2001 update:] We've also heard from Advanzio, who characterizes the situation as a "pissing contest" between a disgruntled software author and the company. They say there are a number of inaccuracies in the depiction of the situation noted above, and have vowed to deliver the other side of the story. Until then, we're leaving the author's information as is, but urge potential customers to consider the company's point of view, too.
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