Choosing a Macintosh Web Authoring Tool: It's Not That Easy These Days
By Shelly Brisbin
Just as surely as </a> follows <a href="http://www.newarchitectmag.com/documents/s=5995/new1013637699/">, Macintosh Web authoring tools have followed one of two courses. While the program that started it all -- Adobe PageMill -- and almost a dozen others remain true to the notion of HTML as a relatively simple way of displaying text, images, and hyperlinks, a trio of sophisticated offerings have taken Web authoring to one, and then another higher level.
GoLive CyberStudio 3.0, NetObjects Fusion 2.02, and Macromedia Dreamweaver 1.2 bear about as much functional resemblance to their low-end cousins as QuarkXPress does to MacDraw.
Where simpler editors concentrate on bread-and-butter HTML and sport interfaces that resemble a word processor's, today's high-end authoring applications are design studios, stuffed to the gills with tools, inspector windows, and site-management database interfaces. What's more, some vendors have seemingly been able to turn on a dime, releasing substantive product upgrades within a few months of their previous offerings. In this article, I'll take a look at CyberStudio, Fusion, and Dreamweaver with an eye toward user interface, support for advanced HTML features, and site-management tools.
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Last year's state of the art among high-end Web applications emphasized page layout, and all three high-end tools included some sort of grid-based element placement system.
