NetObjects Fusion 4

People all over the world use the Web to access information for very different reasons and, understandably, a lot of them will at some point want to emulate what they see on screen and publish their own site. However, most people are either reluctant to fiddle around with HTML or assume that a site which looks good on as many different browser types as possible can be created with the minimum of effort.

The advent of Dynamic HTML has made it easier to create and lay out pages exactly, but if you care about exposure your pages have to be designed to cater for the lowest common denominator. Even with the best packages, this means working within the restrictions HTML places on layout, or generating and working with unwieldy table structures until, after considerable trial and error, you finally end up with something that looks similar on most of the popular browser types and versions.

NetObjects Fusion is a package that has for some time eschewed the traditional wysiwyg tools in favour of a significantly different approach. Instead of forcing you to abide by the restrictions of HTML or Dynamic HTML layers to get the right results, NetObjects Fusion lets you lay pages out any way you like and generates the HTML for you afterwards. And by using a combination of complex table layouts and place-holding clear pixels, NetObjects can generate Web pages that look almost exactly the way you want them to on all browsers with competent table support.

It's a method that works surprisingly well, although it does have the disadvantage of producing code that can be a pain to work with in any other development environment. It makes you wonder why, with the exception of Dreamweaver 2 (reviewed issue 54, p182), no other package has adopted a similar approach. However, it has to be said that while NetObjects 3 was a big improvement over its predecessor, the differences are a lot harder to discern in this latest version.

At first glance, the user interface appears to be untouched. It's organised, as before, into five main working views - Site, Page, Style, Assets and Publish - each of which can be selected by clicking one of the corresponding icons on the left of the toolbar. A further four icons on the right of this surprisingly uncluttered toolbar represent shortcuts common to all views - page/site preview, new page/site, as well as the Go To and Last navigation tools. Also, different draggable and dockable toolbars pop up depending on the view you're in at the time. It's certainly an elegant interface, but it's seriously non-standard, and unless you've used Fusion before you're likely to spend the first few days just getting used to it.

The Page view

Once acquainted though with Fusion's idiosyncrasies, you'll find you spend most of your time in Fusion's Page view. Here, you can arrange and insert text, images, image maps and so on at will in dragged-out marquees, much as you would in a basic DTP package. These elements can then be aligned neatly using the Snap-to-grid option or the Layout palette, and all properties associated with them can be accessed via the same Tool palette, which changes dynamically according to which object is selected at the time. In fact, this system works in exactly the same way as Dreamweaver's Property palette. There's also an Object Tree palette which breaks down all of the elements on the current page into hierarchical order, displayed in collapsible and expandable explorer tree form.

The big drawback with NetObjects' highly visual way of dealing with page editing is that the underlying code is difficult to get at. You can add your own HTML to objects, insert code in various locations and pull in external code you've 'prepared earlier', but without an overall HTML view, it can be awkward to hand-tweak your pages before outputting them.