Product Reviews

Web page design today can be likened to the desktop publishing market 10 years ago. While many of us were able to cobble together pages on expensive, dedicated computer typesetting machines, applications (well, PageMaker) were arriving which would run on a MacPlus and give an ordinary user the power to do it all in a much easier way. Typesetters at the time were divided. The Luddite typesetting machine dedicates derided PageMaker and said it would never allow publications to be created to a professional standard - Mac users, however, knew different.

Until recently, creating a Web page was similar to typesetting in the old, post-hot lead, pre-DTP days - all codes and commands and nothing to see until hard copy stage. Web pages, after all, are based totally on the standard hypertext markup language (HTML), and creating a Web page in this way involves a fair knowledge of what the codes and commands mean. Many Web programmers (Unix-based, I might add) insist it's still the only way to do the job properly and that graphically based HTML editors like HoTMetaL Pro and Adobe PageMill will never catch on.

With an elaborate tagging method of hiding HTML codes from view, HoTMetaL Pro provides (for simple pages, at least) a quasi-WYSIWYG view of what a Web page design looks like when viewed on the Web itself. In reality, though, to view the page exactly as a Web user would view it you need to access the documents you create with a browser. Preferably, you need to use as many browsers as you can to view the pages in as many different ways as possible; the two most popular browsers, Navigator and Internet Explorer, are the most obvious choices.

While tagging of codes is one of HoTMetaL Pro's biggest assets, it's also a large drawback. HoTMetaL Pro provides a high level of rule checking, making it hard to create a badly coded HTML document, and its tags arguably give it that power. However, getting to grips with tags isn't as intuitive as it might otherwise be. Tagging hides HTML codes and so develops the WYSIWYG analogy, but it creates a cluttered document, and tags are almost as cryptic as the HTML codes they cover up. You have the option to hide tags, but then it's not so easy to edit individual element attributes.

Element

ADVERTISEMENT

attributes are edited by command-clicking the attribute, which generates a pop-up menu, then choosing the Element Attributes menu choice (command-r gives the same result). In the Attributes dialog box you then edit to your heart's content. Unfortunately, once you get this far down in HoTMetaL Pro's HTML editing ability, you need to know the very HTML you were trying to hide from in the first place, so it's almost a self-defeating, albeit very powerful, editing facility.

Included is support for applets, scripts, scrolling marquees and objects. Macromedia Director animations or vector-based CorelDRAW! graphics, say, can be embedded, allowing Shockwave or CMX Viewer plug-ins to be used by the browser with your pages. Current and foreseeable plug-ins and extensions should be usable in your HoTMetaL Pro-created Web pages.

HoTMetaL Pro is supplied on CD-ROM with several megabytes of supplementary files in the shape of help documents, tutorials, samples, templates and graphical Web-based clip art. Actually, the term clip art is probably an injustice. Buttons, icons, lines - in fact virtually any dingbat image you might need, is included. Given the current need for Web pages to be viewed as artistic masterpieces, a resource of images and documents like this is not to be sniffed at.

As powerful as HoTMetaL Pro is, it falls some way short of what will be its main competitor's (the impending PageMill 2.0) ease of use. Where HoTMetaL Pro uses tags to indicate HTML code placement, PageMill uses none. Where HoTMetaL Pro requires separate frameset and frame elements and no simultaneous WYSIWYG viewing or editing (it loses all pretence of being WYSIWYG as far as frames are concerned), PageMill allows full WYSIWYG viewing and editing of frames and tables.

While graphics, URLs and so on can now be imported by drag-and-drop means (a significant improvement over version 2 of HoTMetaL), tables are still an awkward feature which really epitomises its rather klunky interface. That's not to say you can't do anything you want with them - you can - but to format a table you need to use dialog boxes and menus. You can't drag boundaries, and you can't even import delimited text into a pre-formatted table. This really isn't good enough for a modern application, let alone a Mac one. Even Word has more intuitive table control than this and tables are, after all, pretty fundamental to Web page creation.

Version 2 of HoTMetaL Pro was criticised, largely because of its non-intuitive interface. Version 3 hasn't completely rectified this, but there is some improvement. HoTMetaL Pro is a powerful and versatile program, which could find great use among technically literate HTML designers. In short, it features several internal layers of power behind a flimsy WYSIWYG outer skin.