Product Reviews

One of the biggest advantages the world wide web has over other sources of information is the fact that anyone can publish their own web site, making it instantly available to millions of users all over the world. Web sites are designed using a language called HTML (hypertext mark-up language), which is used to specify how the various text, pictures and links that make up the site are formatted. But while it's relatively easy to learn (compared to programming languages) HTML can still be fairly fiddly to use. Fortunately, there is now plenty of web-editing software that uses a graphical approach like that of a desktop publishing program, enabling you to create web pages without learning HTML.

HoTMetaL has been around in various incarnations longer than most rival programs, and version 5.0 is the latest release. It boasts a completely redesigned interface, better integration of page design and site management functions, and a new Resource Manager for easily adding graphics and other effects.

The interface of HoTMetaL will be instantly recognisable to anyone who's ever used a Windows word processor, with the main screen containing the document being edited, and various toolbars arranged along the top of the screen (although these can be 'docked' anywhere). Where HoTMetaL differs in this respect from the competition is that it's got three different modes available for viewing your document. First is the standard view where all traces of HTML are hidden, and what you see on the editing

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screen is what appears on the final page. Second is the HTML source view, giving direct access to the unfriendly code itself. Finally, there's the Tags On view, a very useful hybrid of the two.

Why is this useful? Well, editing directly onto the page is usually enough. But the same web page can often look different on different browsers, and sometimes manipulating the HTML directly is the only way to fix things. The Tags On view provides a way of doing this without having to wade through a screenful of code. It also provides the HTML novice with a good way of learning what's going on behind the scenes.

HoTMetaL's Resource Manager is a decent new addition. The CD comes with plenty of icons, buttons, backgrounds, Java applets and other resources that can be dragged directly onto your pages, and you can create libraries of your own resources for easy access later. The quality of the resources included is also pretty high, with some nice subtle graphics mixed with the more flashy stuff, and thankfully few of those dated 3D buttons and icons that are usually the trademark of Swedish computer buffs' home pages.

Unlike many cheaper web site design programs, HoTMetaL Pro comes with a comprehensive site editor. This gives a graphical representation of the structure of your site, and enables you to easily navigate through its individual HTML documents and graphics files. There's also a Site Doctor that enables you to identify problems, broken links and orphan files (such as pictures that aren't linked to anything).

The price and features of HoTMetaL Pro put it into competition with Microsoft's FrontPage 98. While FrontPage is probably slightly easier for the novice to grasp, doing a better job of hiding the underlying HTML, once you do learn a little about how web pages are created, HoTMetaL Pro provides a quicker and more powerful way of doing exactly what you want. Ultimately, you don't have to use a package of this type to create web pages, but features like the Resource and Site Managers, and the excellent interface of HoTMetal Pro make it stand out.