Homesite 4.0 earns our highest recognition for making life easier for Web developers. Our Product of the Year, 1998 award is a designation we assign to the top new products in a variety of categories. This designation means we have tested the product and its competitors in our daily work lives and found to be it by far the best of its category. Look for this symbol in the Web Developer’s Journal for an indication of products we consider to be the best.
Few software tools are evolving faster than HTML page creation tools. Experienced developers prefer tools that let them twiddle the code in its raw form like Homesite and BBEdit. Newcomers usually have no patience for that sort of thing and several products like Microsoft Front Page, Macromedia Dreamweaver, and NetObjects Fusion are competing for their development dollars. The latest release of Homesite puts it well in front of the competition for hands-on HTML editors and shows promise for developing a WYSIWYG interface that experienced developers may eventually be able to support.
Allaire has managed to keep Homesite a bit in front of the competition and the new 4.0 release puts them well in front of the pack. They’ve obviously been listening to the people using the product and have added so many new and useful features it’s going to be almost impossible to list and explain them all in this article. I’m going to go through the most obvious ones and start with the features that immediately made life easier for me in my every-day HTML creation work.
Although it may seem trivial, I found it irritating that I had to actually do a File, Close every time I wanted to close a document. In 4.0 there is now a tiny little "x" in the upper left corner of the document window that closes things neatly with one click – not strictly Windows interface compliant but it’ll do nicely.
This is the first time I‘ve seen a "Browse" window that is worth the trouble. I have refused to use any of the ones I’ve encountered before but I actually use this one and find it quite a bit faster than using a separate browser to constantly refresh and view my work. It is new features like this that make me think we may actually get to WYSIWYG HTML creation tools similar to PageMaker or Quark sometime in the near future. In the same breath let me say that the "Design" window where you could supposedly edit pages in a WYSIWYG manner is not really "there" yet. It’s just not quite the thing, don’t you know.
I’m sure some people will find the ability to easily FTP files as if saving locally to be a time saving tool. I haven’t used this feature myself but hear good reports of it.
There are some really neat tools that let you customise your interface and build handy tools. Wizard Mark-up Language lets you customise or build new wizards. I’ve been a big fan of custom buttons and snippets and note that there is a huge new snippet library available for download from the Allaire site.
The Style Sheet Editor is well thought out but still not up to the job. Dreamweaver does a bit better job of this but I’m still waiting for the definitive style sheet creation and management tool.
You can always tell a real geek by their code. Real geeks evolve their own coding style and can be fanatic about how the indents and spacing in their code is arranged. CodeSweeper allows you to adjust the way you want each tag to be displayed – not just the colours but spacing and indents as well. When, like all WYSIWYG editors, Design View weirdifies the way your code looks, you can reformat your code style afterwards.
I haven’t yet had time to mess with the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) editor but I understand you can download an expansion pack that adds all the cool SMIL tags in your tag chooser window. You can then set up SMIL button bars with a grin on your face.
Of course Homesite 4.0 is completely HTML 4 supportive but it is a bit lacking in advanced DHTML design tools. Again, Dreamweaver does better with that.
The integrated HTML validator is quite well done. Not only are all the problems listed but a double-click on them takes you directly to the guilty line for correction. Unfortunately, like most HTML validators, it does tend to return a whole bunch of errors I don’t consider errors – but then I am the author of "Duct Tape HTML".
Keyboard shortcuts can be real timesavers and 4.0 let’s you customise them to your heart’s content. F9 swaps you back and forth between the full text editing window and the split window view. F12 toggles between Edit and Browse view. I’ve got an extended keyboard with an additional set of F keys on the left and find these shortcuts hugely valuable.
While we’re talking about button bars we need to mention integration with Cold Fusion – another Allaire product. Cold Fusion Studio is also out in a 4.0 version and at first glance is identical to Homesite. If you use Cold Fusion in your projects but don’t need to go for Cold Fusion Studio, Homesite is already set up with Cold Fusion button bars and a wealth of tags that you can easily add.
Anyone doing much in the way of site management and page creation will eventually need to do search and replace functions across multiple files. Homesite has allowed you to do this before but version 4.0 adds the ability to use regular expressions and really do some wild data sorting and manipulation. Although regular expressions are not implemented exactly the same as in some other tools, it is a great addition and I find myself using it in preference to my other search and replace tools.
I could go on and on explaining new features but the main message is that this is powerful and easily customisable HTML page building tool. You can make yourself much more productive by spending time learning and fiddling with the new features. It’s definitely worth the upgrade price.
Allaire are making a real push to be a force to be contended with in the Web development tool market. Cold Fusion is looking to be "best of breed" in the middleware market (it’s really a query building tool) and Homesite has been tops in the HTML editing market for over a year. I think we’re quite safe in giving Homesite 4.0 our Product of the Year 1998 award.
