Product Reviews

Unlike its excellent but pricey Dreamweaver, Macromedia's HomeSite steers clear of graphical finery and gives you what is essentially a plain-looking but powerful HTML editor. HTML is the underlying language that's used by all Web pages, and while it's easy to create sites without understanding HTML, a good working knowledge can help to quickly solve the problems and incompatibilities that often arise when a site is viewed on different computers.

HomeSite's interface is very straightforward, and the main pane where the code itself is entered is surrounded by toolbars and icons that provide quick access to the whole range of HTML tags, as well as extras like JavaScript, which is used to provide flourishes such as fancy animated buttons and forms that check if they're filled in properly. What you don't get are tons of pre-supplied page templates, images and special effects that you can drag and drop onto your pages. In any case, these

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are seldom used on commercial Web sites. This doesn't mean that HomeSite doesn't come with any pre-defined templates, however. The package contains numerous wizards that enable you to easily create things like frame-based pages and dynamic menus.

Once you've created your basic page, adding items to it is a simple matter of clicking in the relevant place within the document and using the HTML tag tools. One problem with HTML is that several different versions of it exist, and some tags work differently in different browsers. Whenever you enter a tag that's affected by this problem, HomeSite makes it clear what support is provided for different attributes. For example, suppose you enter the FONT tag, which is used to choose the font for a piece of text. The options dialog shows all the attributes you can set for this tag, but groups them into those that are standard and those that are browser-specific. This attention to detail may sound fussy, but it addresses exactly the kind of issues that can cause all sorts of headaches when a site is created.

If you're more experienced with HTML, you can just type straight into the editor. This may not sound like much fun, but it can be quicker, especially with HomeSite's Tag Insight option, which is basically an 'auto complete' tool that pops up a list of tags and attributes as you type.

There's no doubt that the technical nature of HomeSite won't be everyone's cup of tea, but if you need complete control over all aspects of your site, this is the package to go for.