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By Hervey Allen (hervey@oregon.uoregon.edu)
After having tested and used several of the current popular WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) HTML editors, Microcomputer Services' staff chose Macromedia's Dreamweaver to create its web site at http://micro.uoregon.edu. Here are some of the questions we asked ourselves when evaluating a WYSIWYG HTML editor:
Keep in mind that all these products undergo constant revision, so by the time you read this, newer versions may already be available.
Availability. Dreamweaver 2.0 is available for both the Mac and PC. Only Netscape and NetObjects Fusion can say the same of equivalent versions of their products. If you'd like to try Dreamweaver, a demo of version 1.2 is available on the 1998 Duckware CD-ROM.
Stability. Dreamweaver is more stable than GoLive CyberStudio on the Mac. (Dreamweaver 1.2 doesn't crash on the PC, but it definitely had a memory leak. We have not determined if this has been resolved in version 2.0.) The program slowed down with very large documents. Still, for almost all our documents this is not a problem.
FTP. The FTP client included with Dreamweaver is great. The one included on the Mac version is the only FTP client we've seen that can download large directory structures from UNIX machines to the Mac. Anarchie (older versions) and Fetch (all versions) often fail if you attempt to download many directories and hundreds of files, which is what we needed to do with the micro.uoregon.edu site. Dreamweaver handles this with no problems.
Another nice feature of Dreamweaver's FTP client is its interface. To upload or download a file, you simply drag your file(s)--or an entire directory structure--between two windows. (A quick aside: Dreamweaver, including version 2, will not connect with VMS machines (e.g., OREGON and DONALD) as it doesn't support FTP service with the VMS operating system.)
Display. We particularly wanted an editor that would let us replicate the directory structure on the web server on our local hard drives, tell the editor the location of the "root" directory of our site, and then display files and all associated graphics without any complicated code changes. Dreamweaver does this by default and it does it very well. This makes Dreamweaver incredibly useful if you already have a web site that you want to update quickly.
Dreamweaver does "fix" your code if it finds errors, but it appears to do a very good job of this. Dreamweaver will only adjust improperly nested, closed, or extra tags, and you have the option of displaying each change it's going to make. You also have the option of turning off code "fixing," if you prefer.
While all HTML editors generate erroneous code from time to time, the code generated by Dreamweaver is quite clean and only rarely includes errors. If it does have errors, they're not common code sequences and you can readily correct them via quick access to the HTML code.
Dreamweaver will close all " " (paragraph) HTML statements with a " " (end paragraph) statement. While this is structurally correct, it can be annoying because you'll always have an extra line at the end of each paragraph and at the bottom of your files. (However, most other WYSIWYG HTML editors do the same thing.) You can adjust this by editing the code directly.
Line endings on DARKWING and GLADSTONE. If you're using Dreamweaver with DARKWING or GLADSTONE, note that these machines run UNIX for their operating system. By default, Dreamweaver 1.2 will upload your HTML files using either Mac or PC end-of-line conventions. While your pages will still load correctly, the actual HTML code does not have the correct line endings if you look at your files on DARKWING or GLADSTONE.
To get around this, tell Dreamweaver to always use the UNIX "end-of-line" format. Open Dreamweaver's Edit menu, choose Preferences, and then select Source Format. In the pop-up menu, set the "end-of-line" option to "UNIX (LF)." Do this before you upload any files to a UNIX-based Web server.
This product ran a close second to Dreamweaver, but it had a few limitations that kept us from using it:
It's only available for the Mac. For our group this was a critical shortcoming. But if you use a Mac, this may be an excellent choice for you. If you'd like to try out the product, a 20-day demo is available on the 1998 CD-ROM.
The included FTP client is good, but not as stable as Dreamweaver's
It adjusts your HTML code a little too much for our taste. While this doesn't cause too many problems, if you've already written a web page, GoLive will update your code as it sees fit. This includes indenting text, adding META tags, and making "corrections" to some code.
The interface to this product was somewhat confusing. It's not easy to set up a mirror of a web site on your hard drive and then open a page and see that page, including all downloaded, associated images. (This is what Dreamweaver excels at.)
GoLive crashed more often than Dreamweaver, our number one choice.
NetObjects is a product aimed at the business user who wants to create a web site from the ground up. If you've already created a web site, we don't recommend using this product. (Note that NetObjects version 3.0 is available for both Mac and Windows.) Some of the specifics that kept us from using this product included:
Actually, FrontPage comes in three flavors: FrontPage 98, FrontPage 1.0 for the Macintosh (both commercial products), and FrontPage Express, which is included free with Internet Explorer version 4 for Windows 95/98 and Windows NT 4.0. (Note that FrontPage Express is not available for the Mac, Windows 3.1, or Windows NT 3.51.) FrontPage 2000 is currently in development.
This product has some excellent features--not the least of which is that it's free--but it also has some serious flaws. One thing to watch out for: if you use the product to update a web site from two places (say, work and home) you can lose data if you allow FrontPage to "update site" instead of updating the individual file you're working on. For example, suppose you updated one file at work and later updated a different version of the same file at home. If you then opted to have FrontPage update your entire web site, the editor would replace your updated file from work with an older version of the file at home.
Confusing? Yes, and that's why this should never be a default feature in a product like FrontPage. Unfortunately, Microcomputer Services has seen a number of Microsoft Products that have excellent feature sets but include default settings that cause no end of problems for the user. This is true of the Microsoft Outlook Express products as well. We sincerely hope that Microsoft will listen to user feedback and update these products accordingly.
If you use FrontPage at the UO you'll need to upload and download files using the FTP protocol. If you use DARKWING or GLADSTONE, FrontPage should correctly detect this when you start to upload your first file. By default, Microsoft wants system administrators to run FrontPage extensions on their operating systems (i.e., additions to large systems like DARKWING and GLADSTONE) to allow the FrontPage product to work to its full ability. Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn't publish the source code for these extensions. This means that if they cause problems or compromise security there's no way for a system administrator to update them. In addition to these issues, there were a few more that kept us from choosing FrontPage for the micro.uoregon.edu web site. Still, if you use the product and are aware of its limitations, it can work well for you.
To summarize, we didn't choose FrontPage for the following reasons:
There is a group of HTML WYSIWYG editors that are less expensive and include free-trial versions that you can use. One of the most popular of these is Claris Home Page 3.0, which is available for both the Mac and PC. (You can get Claris Home Page from the 1998 Duckware CD-ROM.)
This product can work if you're a beginning web publisher and you haven't already created web pages. In fact, this product is probably the most intuitive and easiest to use of all those cited here. This is directly attributable to the fact that Claris Home Page 3.0 has less features than the other products, making it less confusing to use. One caveat: if you've already created a page and are planning to open it using Home Page, be absolutely certain that you have a backup copy of your file. In some cases we have seen Claris Home Page actually remove large sections of HTML code from previously created files. This is equivalent to losing a big chunk of your work if you save the changed file. Remember, for new web publishers, this product can work well. For advanced users or for those who already have a site, like micro.uoregon.edu, it's not recommended for the following reasons:
This is the web editor included with Netscape Communicator. We tested the version of Composer included with Netscape Communicator 4.06. Communicator 4.5 is currently available for Power Macintosh, Windows 95/98, and Windows NT 4.0. Version 4.07 of Communicator is available for 68K Macintosh and Windows 3.1 users.
Overall, Netscape Composer works reasonably well for basic web pages. The code it generates has improved greatly and is generally acceptable. But for advanced web publishing or editing existing web pages, we don't recommend this product.
One of the major problems we encountered with Composer is publishing pages on the web. Once you've finished creating your page you must publish it on the server where it will reside. Most products will allow you do this using either FTP or HTTP Push (the latter is not supported at the UO for security reasons).
While Composer allows this, its interface is very counter-intuitive. In fact, version 4.0x required that you enter the absolute directory path to your files on DARKWING or GLADSTONE to publish a page. In nontechnical terms, this meant that you had to log in on DARKWING or GLADSTONE, type the command "pwd" to see where your files resided on these machines, and then type this exact directory path in Composer's "Publish" dialogue to upload your files.
Because user accounts move to different locations from time to time, Composer's publishing requirement could paralyze your uploads until you logged back in, used "pwd" again, and updated your directory path in Composer. These are all details that should be hidden from the end user--and can be if the product works correctly.
In short, Composer works well for basic files, but isn't sufficiently robust to use with larger web sites. Composer also makes it very difficult to publish your web pages once they're completed.
As noted, most of the WYSIWYG HTML products listed here may work well for your particular situation. Still, after having used and tested these products, we prefer Dreamweaver over the others for its rich feature set, ease of use, and good behavior when opening previously created files and publishing HTML files.
For the beginner, Dreamweaver may seem a bit confusing at first. Still, once the basic concepts are understood this product is very powerful and can increase productivity dramatically. We have found that we can implement new web pages much faster than we did previously when we used products such as straight FTP, BBEdit on the Mac (still this author's favorite text editor), emacs with UNIX, etc. Dreamweaver's newest version, 2.0, has a considerable list of improvements, including some new site management features that appear very promising. To learn more, see http://www.macromedia.com/software/dreamweaver/productinfo/newfeatures/