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What you see's not what they'll get"No-code Web publishers seem set to transform the Web''. When that statement appeared in this column almost a year ago, the days of the text-based Web editor seemed numbered. No longer would website designers look at lines of code like td width=20>img src=''../pic.gif'' width=20 height=20>/td>td>font color=''#660000''. Instead, they'd work in programs that showed you what you were doing while you were doing it, like paper-based page-layout programs. It hasn't quite worked out like that. No-code publishers are certainly popular. The market is full of them - Microsoft's FrontPage, Claris HomePage, Adobe PageMill, Corel Web.Designer, NetObjects Fusion, a dozen other products with capital letters in the middle of their names. But plenty of site-builders are still using text-based editors that write the code directly. HTML: Programmers not neededWriting Web code isn't as hard as it sounds. Webpages are written in a standardised code called HTML - HyperText Mark-up Language. HTML is not computer science; as the name implies, it has more in common with the mark-up notes scribbled on publishing copy. You can write it with a tool as simple as Windows Notepad. The real trick to writing good HTML is to understand that it will work differently under a wide range of conditions. HTML does not simply reproduce a static printout on computer screens. It creates a set of instructions whose final appearance depends on the viewer's browser, monitor and screen settings. No-code editors fail the testNo-code editors are sometimes called WYSIWYG - what you see is what you get. But it's a complete misnomer; on the Web, what you see will never be quite what someone else gets. Precisely because what you see is not what you get, writing HTML has elements of craftsmanship - especially on a complex or sophisticated site. Web pioneer Glenn Davis - he invented the Cool Site of the Day - puts it best in an essay at the Future Focus section of his Project Cool site. "A webpage is a liquid that is poured carefully into a container called a browser," writes Davis. "Like a fine-layered drink, the liquid maintains a form, yet still yields to the shape of its container. It's not a cube of solid ice that will look the same no matter the container." If HTML is a craft, no-code Web publishers have so far often proved to be very cheap and nasty mass-production machines. The worst is the high-priced NetObjects Fusion, which creates insanely complicated code. But just about all no-code editors will add their own peculiar quirks to HTML - some benign, some more damaging. That's a problem if you ever want to write any code which your no-code publisher isn't familiar with. How FrontPage left the front pageUntil recently, The Melbourne Age newspaper's Melbourne Online site at www.theage.com.au used Microsoft FrontPage, widely and probably rightly acclaimed as the best of the current no-code editors. FrontPage allowed journalists without HTML ability to edit pages at will. But Melbourne Online's production editor, Mary Reikert, found FrontPage was creating "enormous problems' at the much-visited site. FrontPage took an eccentric approach to creating links. It created peculiar pieces of HTML where none were needed, and built massive table-tag structures that slowed down Web browsers. Worst of all, it interfered with JavaScript code and image maps written for parts of the site, rendering them unusuable. That problem, she notes, is only likely to worsen as JavaScript and the even newer Dynamic HTML start to crop up on more sites. Reikert has now turned to Allaire's sophisticated HomeSite text editor. Designers search for alternativesReikert is not alone. FrontPage remains widely used; a recent Forrester Research survey found even many professional Web designers were using it. Indeed, no-code editors work best in the hands of people who understand how HTML works. But many site designers are using no-code editors only for rough designs before hand-tuning their work in a text-based editor. They still don't like no-code tools. The respected Seybold Report on Internet Publishing reported in July that "developers don't trust the code that these products generate". And New tools, it claimed, were still failing to gain ground with the Web professionals. Design teacher Vincent Flanders epitomises this attitude. At the biting Web Pages That Suck site, Flanders tries to improve Web design by showing the mistakes site-builders make. One of his pages is called "Just Say No To PageMill!". PageMill and other no-code editors, he says, "are sorta-kinda-HTML generators, but I have a problem with sorta-kinda. I wouldn't want to go out with someone who was sorta-kinda like a woman, if you catch my drift." Software designers may be starting to wake up to the idea that no-code editors won't solve everyone's problems. Macromedia, whose competent but uninspiring Backstage no-code editor made barely a dent in the market, is now previewing a promising tool called Dreamweaver, which combines a no-code editor with a text-based tool - HomeSite for the PC, BBEdit for the Mac. Macromedia pledges that DreamWeaver won't interfere with hand-written code. We'll see.
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Project Cool's
Download the Dreamweaver beta from Macromedia