News & Views Two Contrasting Web Editors
News & Views Software Review

 

by Mike Hendry

Originally published in News & Views November 1999 issue.

Copyright 1999 STC-Philadelphia Metro Chapter. For permission to reprint this article, contact the Managing Editor.

Claris Home Page 3.0 ($99) and Macromedia Dreamweaver 2.0 ($299) are in different categories price-wise, so the first question that comes to my mind is "Where does the extra money go?"

Here are some of the things I am looking for:
  • How fast could a novice develop a competent web page?
  • How much control does an advanced user have over the code?
  • Does it support:
    • Frames?
    • Dynamic HTML?
    • Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)?
    • JavaScript?
  • How are its site management tools?
  • How are its tutorial/help files?

When I first started looking into these alternatives to Notepad, I opened a site I was working on to see how far I could get. Did I understand the broken links report? No. Did the page look like what I know it looks like in the browser? No. Oh, well, on to the tutorials.

Later that month...

Wow. I am really enamored of Dreamweaver. It has all the toys a professional would want—that's where the money goes. The bottom line is if you are a novice or dabbler and want to get a basic web site up fast, Home Page is for you. If you are a professional and need advanced options such as Dynamic HTML, CSS, layering, built-in scripting, then Dreamweaver is worth the extra money.

Claris Home Page

Claris Home Page will get you up and running fast. It has assistants (wizards) that guide you in creating several standard types of web pages, using frames or tables for layout (you decide which). It automatically adds graphical navigation aids and standard pages. It comes with some animations and clip-art. You fill in the text and your own images, and you are ready to go. It will check broken links and help you upload the site. If you want to design your own site, it has all the basics and is fairly easy to use, with a tutorial to get you up and running. You can edit the HTML directly.

Some of its weaknesses are: the site editor doesn't have a graphical display so you can't see how your pages relate, and the check for broken links function is weak. It checks the links one at a time rather than providing a list, and doesn't identify the file in which broken links reside, which can be disorienting. The biggest weakness, however, is the help file. Done in HTML, it doesn't have search capabilities, and the navigation is awkward.

Macromedia Dreamweaver

Dreamweaver has many advanced features to satisfy the professional web designer. It doesn't have any wizards, which is a loss to the beginner, but it has a great help file (also in HTML) and a good tutorial to get you started. The site editor provides a nice graphical site map (Figure 1), which you can export to a bitmap to use on your site (Dreamweaver provides you with some control over the layout, but I would like some control also over the icons and graphics used.)


Figure 1: The Dreamweaver site map feature makes site management and navigation easy.

Some of the advanced features it has include:

  • Built-in "behaviors," JavaScripts to perform common tasks such as button rollovers, browser make and version checking, show/hide layer, open new browser window or popup, and more. You can also write your own behaviors in JavaScript and add them to the list.
  • Support for and creation of CSS.
  • Support for interactivity and animation (Dynamic HTML).
  • Use of layers for formatting, and conversion back and forth between layers and tables.

Layers are worth discussing further. Using tables to format a web page is a common practice, but it can lead to accessibility problems. Aural browsers, used by the visually impaired, try to read tables as data, and can result in gibberish when they come across a table used for layout. Layers are a more versatile way to format a page, and leave tables for the data they were originally designed for. I'll talk more about this in a future column.

So to recap, if you want to get a basic web site up and running fast, Home Page may be for you. If you are serious and tired of designing by hand, you are going to have to spend the extra money for a serious tool like Dreamweaver.

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Posted November 22, 1999 (dls)