Product Reviews

Three years ago it seemed only a matter of time before the mysteries of HTML coding would be buried safely beneath the user-friendly interface of a number of promising Web design applications. One of those was GoLive CyberStudio, a Mac only application with a growing reputation. It's now known as Adobe GoLive, and in its second incarnation under this name Adobe has made a real attempt at getting back the crown of definitive Mac WYSIWYG Web tool from Macromedia Dreamweaver.

Like Macromedia, Adobe has recognised that there's more to the Web than static designs, and GoLive 5.0 follows Dreamweaver UltraDev into the dynamic world of database-driven sites. The Dynamic Link extension that was released as a free download for version 4.0 earlier this year has been incorporated into this release, allowing drag-and-drop creation of ASP sites from within the application. However, unlike the more expensive Dreamweaver UltraDev, this database-linking functionality is limited to ASP. If you want to embed ColdFusion or PHP tags into your code, you'll still have to do it by hand. This is disappointing but, given the ubiquity of ASP, not disastrous.

The feature that will most please the code purists is the adoption of what Adobe calls '360Code'. Like Dreamweaver's RoundTrip technology, this means GoLive leaves any changes you make to the code. Unlike visual editors of three years ago, when tiny changes to the layout in visual mode would have the program re-writing your carefully crafted HTML page in its entirety, GoLive knows when to leave things alone.

This is all well and good, but it ignores one of the grim realities of modern Web design. A modern site is a bewildering array of tables within tables within tables. Although this shouldn't impact on HTML design, it invariably does as developers will want sections of a page neatly ordered into sections of HTML, coded in a modular fashion and possibly stored in separate files. Like Dreamweaver, GoLive doesn't reflect this, although it's a step in the right direction.

There are several new interface items, and the overall look has taken a step towards the Adobe standard - that is, it looks more like Photoshop. The Markup Tree palette, effectively an answer to Dreamweaver's tag-based navigation, lets you navigate a site by clicking on tags, which can be a useful way to approach the site.

However, professional coders wanting to use GoLive for quick editing of tables will be disappointed. Editing tables is as tricky as it is in Dreamweaver - even more so, perhaps,

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as much of the work has to be done in the separate Table palette, a most unwelcome solution to the problem of table editing. It has a nasty habit of resizing itself down to a size that makes selection nearly impossible, and you can't change the properties of a table cell in the Inspector while you've highlighted the cell contents.

Of course, none of this would matter if you didn't have to use tables as the primary means of laying out an HTML page, and you shouldn't have to - the HTML 4 standard specifies a system for laying out layers (floating boxes in GoLive) and specifying their exact positioning. This is the system Dreamweaver uses for its layout grid, and GoLive works even better using this system than it does creating one of its complicated tables. Although the resulting HTML from this method is very neat and eminently editable, only users of Internet Explorer 4.5 and above will be able to see your page as you intended it. Earlier browsers won't work properly, and Netscape - which has very poor support for HTML 4 - will be unreliable at best.

As might be expected, Adobe has gone a long way towards integrating GoLive with its other applications, including support for drag and drop so that any Illustrator, LiveMotion or Photoshop file can be double-clicked on within GoLive to open them. The product includes the core Photoshop engine, which means Photoshop documents can be resized and scaled from within GoLive -Êa handy time-saver for busy designers.

Once you find your way around the program, you'll find that GoLive has an impressive feature set, especially in site management where it certainly has the edge over Dreamweaver. FTP uploading is reasonable, although far slower than in Anarchie. Version control uses the industry-standard WebDAV protocol. This requires that your server has WebDAV installed. By contrast, Dreamweaver doesn't require any server-side configuration. If you just have shared Web space, you can't use this feature, but if you do have access to a WebDAV server, it's a far more powerful solution.

Most impressive is GoLive's site-mapping facilities. By creating a conceptual map, you actually create files that correspond to the boxes (applying a choice of template). You then work on those files in a staging area, and publish the result to the real site. This sort of dynamic documentation is a powerful tool that more applications could make use of. The site map also prints reasonably well; not brilliantly, given that it's an Adobe product, but probably good enough to keep project managers everywhere happy.

In other areas, though, Dreamweaver outperforms GoLive. It's templating is more powerful, and it supports server-side includes . So if your site relies on either of these features, Dreamweaver remains the better option. However, GoLive is a serious challenger, and its site-management tools and Photoshop integration beat Macromedia's product hands down. Neither package replaces hand coding in the way that Softpress Freeway does, but both are a significant step in that direction.

Power Mac, Mac OS 8.6 or higher, 48Mb RAM, 70Mb hard disk space.