Product ReviewsDesign/DTP
The world of Web design can be neatly subdivided into three categories. There are HTML authors for whom using a WYSIWYG editor is anathema, Web designers who are happy to use WYSIWYG editors but prefer editors with custom-designed interfaces and cutting-edge features, and traditional print designers who look for familiar page layout tools in their WYSIWYG packages. Freeway 2.0 falls happily into the last category, and even to a code-head like myself, it sounds pretty good. It supports CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), as implemented in HTML 4.0, and it has a special compatibility mode that lets you use style sheets while retaining compatibility with the most popular variant of HTML, version 3.2. Freeway 1.0 offered a Web page design environment that traditional designers could understand without suffering painful learning curves. However it lacked key features such as frameset support or Web page import. This made it feel dated, but Freeway 2.0 is intended to make up for these problems. There were some rough edges to this beta version, but it's still a very interesting product. If you're familiar with XPress or Illustrator, Freeway is pretty straightforward to start using. You make text boxes and link them together. You define master documents and styles and apply them to items on the page. You can even draw directly on screen with a familiar pen tool. It's a set of metaphors almost every designer will be familiar with, whether they care about HTML or not. It lacks the drag-and-drop spontaneity of PageMill or Home Page, but Freeway's marketing point is that it offers the control designers feel they lack with the Web. Buried in there, for the more adventurous designer, is the ability to allow text and graphics to flow to the size of the browser window. But most traditional designers will be more comfortable getting started with the pixel-perfect positioning. At this beta stage, Freeway's editing environment was impressive but incomplete. There are many simple HTML functions that are left for the user to fill in, which somewhat defeats the point of a WYSIWYG editor. The ability to generate your own font sets is a case in point. Web designers are used to combining likely groupings (as in ) to cope with people who don't have their font of choice. If you want anything more than a basic set of tags, you have to add them manually into a dialog box with no help, although this is something which should be addressed by the final release. There's also no HTML preview window. This is something that more technically minded designers might like to see, but as Freeway doesn't use HTML as its native file format, this isn't likely to become an option. Whether this bothers you depends on your technical predelictions, but in practise it shouldn't prove to be a problem. Framesets are handled reasonably well; the frameset document structure is created as an alternative view in the same document as the frame content pages. This makes page management very simple, although it also means separate Freeway documents can't be referenced directly. Alternatively, frame content references can be complete URLs, allowing existing HTML documents anywhere on the Web to be included. Frame borders can be dragged around to reshape the layout, the frame border width can be set from 0 to 10 pixels, and a separate 'NoFrames' page can be set up for browsers which don't support frameset pages. One major new feature is Freeway's support for multiple types of HTML. It's a bit loose to refer to them as true HTML DTDs (Document Type Definitions), as one of the three is really a hack to get the best out of both HTML 3.2 and CSS. The basic Freeway mode is to produce code that works for browsers that understand HTML 3.2. In practice, this means it covers most current
The code this produces is the table set common to most pixel-obsessive HTML editors. But Freeway has a trick that other Web design packages don't have: the ability to render text as GIFs, allowing designers to use any font at any size. HTML purists will argue that text rendered as GIFs isn't good style, and it has drawbacks for many applications. Rendering text as GIFs increases the overall data size of an exported layout, which means longer loading times for the end user. Freeway quite happily renders any text it can't cope with in the version of HTML you're working with, and sometimes even when creating HTML that may be technically possible within the DTD you've opted for. A 12K GIF is less efficient than the equivalent plain text. However, it does ensure the end user sees exactly what the designer created - kerning, knockout fills and all - albeit at the expense of download speed. Anything defined as a GIF can be set to a specific number of colours, and there is an option for seeing the final export size, and even for previewing the actual result on the screen. The other pure HTML mode available is HTML 4.0 - the flavour of HTML supported by Navigator/Communicator and Internet Explorer 4.0. This, theoretically, gives you much greater control over typography through true CSS integration. Unfortunately, Freeway only supports a subset of the available formatting options. Its rival, Dreamweaver, has five option panels devoted to CSS typography, while Freeway manages only 20 or so options in total. However, Freeway is unarguably easier to use than Dreamweaver, which should negate these differences for Freeway's intended market. The program allows sophisticated effects such as graphic and text overlay through the use of DIV tags (incorrectly called layers in the dialog box). And, usefully, the program can output formatted text as GIF graphics. But there are a number of higher-level options that don't seem to have been implemented - there's no Z-index attribute, for example. (Z-index is the virtual depth at which the DIV lies and is vital for JavaScript manipulation of a page's elements.) In between is the HTML 3.2 + CSS mode, which allows designers to create pages with the table grid holding everything in place, but with the added power of CSS control over type for browsers that can read style sheets. However, the default is to turn styled text into GIFs. Another major new feature of Freeway 2.0 is the ability to assign actions to a page object. The most obvious of these is a painless piece of code that allows the user to create JavaScript button rollovers. The final product should include many of these actions, although only a handful are included in the beta release. Actions are also extensible through a rather clunky API. The rollover action supplied with the beta worked reasonably well. It produced some hiccups with matching the correct sizes of the graphics we used, but the final version should perform properly. Although it has shortcomings, Freeway is a great tool. It may be irritating to use for a Web builder more accustomed to hand coding, but print designers coming straight to the Web will find it easy to pick up and before long will be creating good-looking Web sites. It is strongly based on the QuarkXPress look and feel, so it won't behave like an alien tool. It's a powerful program that's both fast and has lots of useful functionality. This preview has rough edges which need work before the final version can be released. For example, the heralded HTML import feature sometimes produced odd results. But this is what beta versions are all about, and hopefully user feedback (SoftPress has posted the preview version on its Web site) will help SoftPress to hone Freeway before the final release. If you enjoy getting your fingers into the guts of your HTML work, you may find Freeway too limiting, but if you are a traditional designer worried about the highly technical aspect of Web page design, this can help make your life easier. It won't help you come to grips with database-driven Web sites or other server-based issues, but it is a competent and designer-friendly, page-oriented Web site creation package. By Jim Smith |
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