Product Reviews

It has been a long time coming, but

version 4 of Softpress Freeway has finally been released. This update marks the biggest leap forward in this layout-oriented website design tool's history, putting XHTML code generation and full CSS-based layout tools at the disposal of the code-shy web designer.

If you've seen Freeway before, the new interface will be a surprise. There are fewer floating palettes than before, and the main document window includes a collapsible Site panel that shows the document pages and folders on the left.

If you're expecting a Dreamweaver-like editor, you'll be disappointed. Freeway is a page-layout program dedicated to producing websites. Rather than working in HTML, it generates optimised code from your designs. If you're more at home in InDesign or QuarkXPress than with code, Freeway is certainly a strong starting point.

The big news with Freeway 4 is its elegant support for CSS. Creating CSS-based layouts in Freeway 4 is exceptionally simple, as it offers full control over size, padding, borders and more. In Freeway's published output, anything you draw on the page will be positioned and styled using CSS 'div' tags, more traditional table-based structures, or combinations of the two. Pages can be output in HTML 3.2, HTML 4, XHTML transitional or strict formats. Pick the output you want, hit republish and everything's rebuilt for you from scratch.

The beauty of this system is that you need know nothing about the CSS side of web design or what strict XHTML is to produce sites that are compliant with these standards. After a little experimenting with Freeway's Inspector palette, you'll

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be putting complex layouts together without resorting to code tweaks or hacks of any kind. And this is where you'll either love Freeway or hate it. You simply can't get your hands on the code - well, not directly.

If your pages are mainly code such as PHP it makes more sense to use BBEdit, and Dreamweaver is better at editing existing HTML documents (because Freeway takes you away from coding, it doesn't give you direct HTML access). Having said that, you can add custom code in a number of different ways. As well as Actions, there are markup items (layout elements that contain custom code), 'extended attributes' for all sorts of items, and the HTML Markup windows for inserting data into various points in the HTML file structure.

The layout tools include HTML boxes, graphic boxes, table objects and form elements. Advanced graphics features are now built in and have been broadened and improved. You can set the transparency of graphic fills and text, as well as individual images and fills. You can also make custom drop shadows, apply graduated transparency and alter individual RGB colour channels of imported graphics. Combined with the ability to import layered and transparent Photoshop and Tiff graphics and automatically output merged items in web-ready formats, this is perfect for on-the-page graphics work.

There will always be a code-versus-Freeway argument. Writing and editing code is, for some, the most elegant way of generating standards-compliant web output. Freeway 4, though, shows that this isn't necessarily the case. For anyone who wants to design web pages without coding, Freeway presents an attractive proposition.

Freeway 4 still has some of the weaknesses of older versions. There's no multiple undo and no support for editing many selected items at once. You can set the alignment or the colour of multiple objects, but you have to type measurements an item at a time. Furthermore, some aspects of CSS aren't fully implemented yet - for example, CSS background images aren't shown in the page layout view.

Nevertheless, for new site design and production, especially when you want to concentrate on the look and have the structure done for you, Freeway 4 is exceptionally fast and flexible.