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Web authoring wizards Of eight products we tested, Fusion and HotTMetaL Pro produce enchanting Web sites like magic.
By Mark Gibbs If you need professional-strength tools for authoring and managing HTML pages, look no further than NetObjects, Inc.'s NetObjects Fusion and Softquad, Inc.'s HoTMetaL Pro, the pair that stood above the crowd in our test of eight top products. NetObjects Fusion tops the list with its elegant design and ease of use. Softquad's HoTMetaL Pro also ranks high for its industrial-strength editing features. A look at the accompanying Buyer's Guide table shows some of the more than 100 serious products available that range in price from the highly attractive ''free'' to $500. Because we wanted to test products that cover a wide range of user needs, we included some that didn't meet the criteria for inclusion in the table; specifically, some lack site management features. Our evaluation focused on the facilities each product offered for the creation and modification of Web content in the context of business use. Beyond editing HTML files, we wanted to explore which products supported features such as Web site management and server uploading -the kinds of facilities that matter in a corporate environment. We selected products based partly on our own research into the most popular and useful tools and partly based on recommendations from readers. Besides the two top finishers, we evaluated:
Our top pick, NetObjects Fusion, and Macromedia's Backstage Designer, are unique in this lineup. NetObjects Fusion focuses on providing a strongly structured Web site that can be built from data automatically extracted from databases. Backstage Designer is unique in our selection as it is intended to operate in conjunction with a Web server back-end process called Backstage Server that provides data handling services and database connectivity. HTML content editingGiven that HTML has undergone a number of revisions over the past few years, and Netscape and Microsoft Corp. have each introduced their own variants, Web authoring tools differ widely in how they support HTML content editing.While all of the vendors in our review support the current version of HTML, 3.2, those that handle the Microsoft- and Netscape-specific extensions do so in different ways. Consider Microsoft's Marquee tag, which provides a scrolling text region. It's supported as a pick list of attributes in an attribute dialog by HoTMetaL Pro and HomeSite, as a simple predefined text string you need to edit in Arachnophilia, and is not supported at all in HotDog Professional, NetObjects Fusion, AOLpress, Backstage Designer or Netscape Composer. If ease of use is crucial to your choice, the pick-list method of defining a page element is absolutely required. The predefined static string method - in effect, pasting into the document a chunk of text as a prototype - demands that you know all of the options for a given element. Given the number of different tags available, this is only practical if you know your HTML thoroughly. But perhaps the most important aspect of content editing is how a tool presents a document for editing. Showing the raw text of tags as the first-generation tools does detract from the task of creating content. Conversely, a fully WYSIWYG editing environment may not allow you to achieve certain effects because it simplifies the presentation and lacks the ability to customize tags to achieve WYSIWYG presentation. AOLpress, Backstage Designer, NetObjects Fusion and Netscape Composer all offer WYSIWYG editing while the rest, with one exception, use a purely tag-editing interface. The exception is HoTMetaL Pro, which offers both modes as well as direct editing of ''raw'' HTML code. For anything other than the most specialized Web content design requirements, WYSIWYG tool are far easier to use. The most impressive product in our review group was NetObjects Fusion. This tool makes Web authoring a lot like page layout in desktop publishing. Even better, because a table is used as a placement grid, the final result rendered by the browser is usually very close to the layout you create in the editor. Site management featuresWhile editing Web pages is straightforward - if occasionally a little complex - managing a collection of more than a few pages quickly becomes a nightmare without help.Site management allows the connections between pages to be examined, tested to see if they are valid, and reports on the statistics of the site - page sizes, number of links of various kinds, and so on. Among our selected products, only Backstage Designer and Netscape Composer offered no site management services. Of the rest, the most superficial site management belongs to HomeSite and HotDog Professional. HomeSite offers only a project folder with a list of files that doesn't show dependencies or links. Link verification also isweak because it is offered only on a file-by-file basis. HotDog's tool, called WebSite, is even more limited than HomeSite's. WebSite requires that you manually add all Web documents to the project management system rather than following links to determine which files are to be included. HotDog's site management tool is really only for specifying which files are to be uploaded to a Web server as a group. Link verification is non-existent. Arachnophilia offers a Site Analyzer that follows all the links from a starting document and reports on which on-site resources are referenced, which are not (that is, which files are in the same subdirectories but not linked to the site), and which links are unresolvable (broken or incorrect) or off-site. We found Site Analyzer to be a little crude in its approach in that it can't find all references and produces a poorly formatted report. AOLpress has good site management through its MiniWeb feature. MiniWebs are a graphical representation of the contents of a Web site in which new pages can be placed and files imported. With a large Web site, this map becomes very busy, making it hard to see the relationships between documents or, in a busy display, even find a document. In that case, the graphical layout can be replaced with a tree layout of file dependencies. In either view, clicking on the icon of a document loads it into an edit window. The remaining products, NetObjects Fusion and HoTMetaL Pro, perform site management at a completely different level. HoTMetaL Pro Information Manager provides a Single File View that shows which files depend on a specific file, a linear Tree View of all links from the Web home page and, the coolest view of all, the Web View, which provides a graphical tree-like representation of the Web site that can be rotated, allowing hidden pages to be seen. In all views, files can be selected for editing, and broken and external links can be identified. Unlike all of the other products, site management is a primary focus of NetObjects Fusion. All content development is done by creating documents linked into a Web hierarchy and the product automatically creates buttons that link to other pages. Forms, tables, frames and image mapsAnother crucial concern for HTML authoring tools is how they handle editing forms, tables and frames. Among the products we looked at, some offered no support, one provides a template that needs to be hand edited and others provide Wizards that lead you by the hand through the creation process. In general, products are either weak or strong in all three.Forms are sections of Web documents that allow users to enter data by selecting items from lists, checking checkboxes and radio buttons and entering text in text boxes. They are complex constructs, yet you'll find no trace of support for forms in Netscape Composer, while Arachnophilia provides nothing more than a template. The rest of the products all do a pretty good job of assisting the user in the process of creating and modifying forms. Tables, like forms, shouldn't be hard to create. NetObjects Fusion is very good in this area, with HotDog Professional and AOLpress in second place. Frames are a different issue. Frames are regions in a browser window that each contain different documents. When used well, frames take the navigation and presentation of a site up a couple of notches. But because frames are not specified in a single file, they are tricky to support. So it's no surprise that some vendors, notably Netscape and Macromedia, don't even try to support them. HotDog Professional makes an attempt at frame editing support but it's a weak effort. The wizard is buggy (it has a field to specify the width of frames but it doesn't work) and is not particularly helpful; to get the right result requires far more thought on the part of the author than it should. Only NetObjects Fusion, HoTMetaL Pro and AOLpress really succeed. In the case of Fusion, frames are, for a change, actually very easy to create and modify. No authoring tool should have problems building image maps - the images on Web pages with ''hot spots'' that act as links to other Web content. Much to our surprise, HomeSite, Arachnophilia and Netscape Composer don't even try to support the creation of image maps. The rest all do a pretty good job. Importing, templates, wizards, help and uploadingBecause corporations have so much data locked away in existing documents, it's important to be able to import and convert them for inclusion in a Web site, particularly on intranets.Most of the products we evaluated don't make much effort to import more than text and Rich Text Format files. The one exception is HoTMetaL Pro, which can import and convert a large range of word processing and data file types. When importing existing documents, templates and wizards are a tremendous help. Templates are preformatted pages that you modify, while wizards are processes that ask you questions and create customized content. With the exception of Arachnophilia and AOLpress, most of the vendors offer a good range of templates and wizards. Documentation for these Web authoring products, however, is only fair, which given the scope and complexity of some of the products is a little disappointing. The picks of the bunch are NetObjects Fusion, Backstage Designer, and HoTMetaL Pro, all of which have good on-line help and manuals. On the other hand, Netscape Composer's eccentric help system is amateurish and AOLpress' is poorly thought out; it's hard to read the help screens for dialog boxes when they appear behind the dialog in the main application window. Finally, we come to what to do with authored content when it's ready for prime time - upload it to a Web server. Only Arachnophilia lacks this feature, though AOLpress works only with America Online's servers and HomeSite relies on Microsoft's Web Publishing Wizard, which you need to download from Microsoft's Web site. Without this you'd have to use a separate program such as a File Transfer Protocol client to upload documents to a Web server. The write stuffIn general, all of the tools we looked at worked (bugs excepted) and could be used effectively in a corporate environment to produce and modify Web content.In choosing which products might be best for you, consider whether the product is too complex for your needs - you don't want to have to institute major training programs to get your users up to speed - and how much support is available (obviously, free products have little or no real support).
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