You’re two months behind on your Web site upgrade and slipping futher every day. Dozens of vendors are lingering in the hall, swearing they’ve got just the thing to get you back on track.
Well, some of them actually do.
Our test of eight Web authoring tools turned up two – NetObjects Fusion and HoTMetaL Pro – that can get you out of hot water.
If neither of these is right for you, chances are you’ll find one out of the more than 28 products listed in our Buyer’s Guide chart. You’ll need to understand what each class of Web authoring tools is intended to do, so we’ll walk you through the options – from tools for building light-duty Web sites to those tailored to specific applications.
No matter where you work, chances are somebody is pushing you to build a better Web site, whether it’s for internal or external consumption. And chances are you’re going to need some serious help.
With this in mind, we offer our Buyer’s Guide to Web Authoring Tools. You’ll find here tools ranging from rather primitive freebies to sophisticated offerings that will help you build, manage and maintain your site.
We chose eight products, collectively representing the range of what’s available, to put under the microscope in the lab. As the Review below shows, two of them proved to be head and shoulders above the rest.
We also polled the known vendor universe for high-end HTML design tools for content production. To be classified as “high end,” a tool had to be able to publish pages to Web sites while enabling you to edit images and create tables, frames and forms. The results of our search are shown in the Product Chart that begins on page 44.
There’s a lot here to digest before you buy, but the Issues and Trends story on page 44 should help point you in the right direction.
If you need professional-strength tools for authoring and managing HTML pages, look no further than NetObjects, Inc.’s NetObjects Fusion and Softquad, Inc.’s HoT-MetaL Pro, the pair that stood out from the crowd in our test of eight top products. NetObjects Fusion tops the list with its elegant design and ease of use. Softquad’s HoT-MetaL Pro also ranks high for its industrial-strength editing features.
A look at the accompanying Buyer’s Guide table shows some of the more than 100 products available that range in price from the highly attractive “free” to $500. Because we wanted to test products that cover a range of user needs, we included some that didn’t meet the criteria for inclusion in the table; specifically, some lack site management features.
Our evaluation focused on the facilities each product offers for the creation and modification of Web content in the context of business use. Beyond editing HTML files, we wanted to explore which products offer features such as Web site management and server uploading – the kinds of facilities that matter in a corporate environment.
We selected products based on our own research into the most popular and useful tools and on recommendations from readers. Besides the two top finishers, we evaluated:
America Online, Inc.’s AOLpress 2.0
Sausage Software’s HotDog Professional 4 beta
Macromedia, Inc.’s Backstage Designer 2.0
Allaire Corp.’s HomeSite 2.5
Arachnophilia 2.5, a shareware product
Netscape Communications Corp.’s Netscape Composer
Our top picks, NetObjects Fusion and Macromedia’s Backstage Designer, are unique in this lineup. NetObjects Fusion focuses on providing a highly structured Web site that can be built from data automatically extracted from databases. Backstage Designer is intended to operate in conjunction with a Web server back-end process called Backstage Server that provides data handling services and database connectivity.
HTML content editing
Given that HTML has undergone a number of revisions over the past few years, and Netscape and Microsoft Corp. each have introduced variants, Web authoring tools differ widely in how they support HTML content editing.
While all of the vendors in our review support the current version of HTML, 3.2, those that handle the Microsoft- and Netscape-specific extensions do so in different ways. Consider Microsoft’s Marquee tag, which provides a scrolling text region. It’s supported as a pick list of attributes in an attribute dialog by HoTMetaL Pro and HomeSite, and as a simple predefined text string you need to edit in Arachnophilia. It is not supported at all in HotDog Professional, NetObjects Fusion, AOLpress, Backstage Designer or Netscape Composer.
If ease of use is crucial to your choice, the pick-list method of defining a page element is absolutely required. The predefined static string method – in effect, pasting into the document a chunk of text as a prototype – demands that you know all of the options for a given element. Given the number of different tags available, this is practical only if you know your HTML thoroughly.
But perhaps the most important aspect of content editing is how a tool presents a document for editing. Showing the raw text of tags, as the first-generation tools does, detract from the task of creating content. Conversely, a fully WYSIWYG editing environment may not allow you to achieve certain effects because it simplifies the presentation and lacks the ability to customize tags.
AOLpress, Backstage Designer, Net-Objects Fusion and Netscape Composer all offer WYSIWYG editing, while the rest, with one exception, use a pure tag-editing interface. The exception is HoTMetaL Pro, which offers both modes as well as direct editing of “raw” HTML code.
For anything other than the most specialized Web content design requirements, WYSIWYG tools are far easier to use. The most impressive product in our review group was NetObjects Fusion. This tool makes Web authoring a lot like page layout in desktop publishing. Even better, because a table is used as a placement grid, the final result rendered by the browser is usually close to the layout you create in the editor.
Site management features
While editing Web pages is straightforward – if occasionally a little complex – managing a collection of more than a few pages can quickly become a nightmare unless you’ve got some tools to help you out.
Site management tools allow the connections between pages to be examined and tested to see if they are valid. They also give you reports on the statistics of the site – page sizes, number of links of various kinds and so on. Among our selected products, only Backstage Designer and Netscape Composer offered no site management services.
Of the rest, the most superficial site management belongs to HomeSite and HotDog Professional. HomeSite offers only a project folder with a list of files that doesn’t show dependencies or links. Link verification also is weak because it is offered only file by file.
HotDog’s tool, called WebSite, is even more limited than HomeSite’s. WebSite requires that you manually add all Web documents to the project management system rather than following links to determine which files are to be included. HotDog’s site management tool really is only for specifying which files are to be uploaded to a Web server as a group. Link verification is nonexistent.
Arachnophilia offers a Site Analyzer that follows all the links from a starting document and reports on which on-site resources are referenced, which are not (that is, which files are in the same subdirectories but not linked to the Web site), and which links are unresolvable (broken or incorrect) or off-site. We found Site Analyzer to be a little crude in its approach in that it can’t find all references and produces a poorly formatted report.
AOLpress has good site management through its MiniWeb feature. MiniWebs are a graphical representation of the contents of a Web site in which new pages can be placed and files imported. With a large Web site, this map becomes very busy, making it hard to see the relationships between documents or, in a busy display, even find a document. In this case, the graphical layout can be replaced with a tree layout of file dependencies. In either view, clicking on the icon of a document loads it into an edit window.
The remaining products, NetObjects Fusion and HoTMetaL Pro, perform site management at a completely different level. HoTMetaL Pro Information Manager provides a Single File View that shows which files depend on a specific file, a linear Tree View of all links from the Web home page and, the coolest view of all – the Web View.
The Web View provides a graphical tree-like representation of your Web site that can be rotated, allowing hidden pages to be seen. In all views, files can be selected for editing, and broken and external links can be identified.Unlike all of the other products, site management is a primary focus of NetObjects Fusion. All content development is done by creating documents linked into a Web hierarchy, and the product automatically creates buttons that link to other pages.
Forms, tables and frames
Another major concern is how well HTML authoring tools handle editing forms, tables and frames. Among the products we looked at, some offer no support, one provides a template that needs to be hand edited and others provide wizards that lead you by the hand through the creation process. In general, products are either weak or strong in all three.
Forms are sections of Web documents that allow users to enter data by selecting items from lists, checking checkboxes and radio buttons and entering text in text boxes. They are complex constructs, yet you’ll find no trace of support for forms in Netscape Composer, and Arachnophilia provides nothing more than a template. The rest of the products all do a pretty good job of assisting the user in the process of creating and modifying forms. Tables, like forms, shouldn’t be hard to create. NetObjects Fusion is very good in this area, with HotDog Professional and AOLpress in second place.
Frames are a different issue. Frames are regions in a browser window that each contain different documents. When used well, frames take the navigation and presentation of a site up a couple of notches.
But because frames are not specified in a single file, they are tricky to support.
So it’s no surprise that some vendors, notably Netscape and Macromedia, don’t even try to support them.
HotDog Professional makes an attempt at frame editing support, but it’s a weak effort. The wizard is buggy (it has a field to specify the width of frames but it doesn’t work) and not particularly helpful. To get the right result requires far more thought on the author’s part than it should.
Only NetObjects Fusion, HoTMetaL Pro and AOLpress really succeed. In the case of NetObjects Fusion, frames are, for a change, very easy to create and modify.
No authoring tool should have problems building image maps – the images on Web pages with “hot spots” that act as links to other Web content. Much to our surprise, HomeSite, Arachnophilia and Netscape Composer don’t even try to support the creation of image maps. The rest all do a pretty good job.
Because corporations have so much data locked away in existing documents, it’s important to be able to import and convert them for inclusion in a Web site, particularly on intranets. Most of the products we evaluated don’t make much effort to import more than text and Rich Text Format files. The one exception is HoTMetaL Pro, which can import and convert a large range of word processing and data file types.
When importing existing documents, templates and wizards are a tremendous help. Templates are preformatted pages that you modify, while wizards are processes that ask you questions and create customized content. With the exception of Arachnophilia and AOLpress, most of the vendors offer a good range of templates and wizards.
But documentation for these Web authoring products is only fair, which, given the scope and complexity of some of the products, is a little disappointing. The picks of the bunch are NetObjects Fusion, Backstage Designer and HoTMetaL Pro, all of which have good online help and manuals.
On the other hand, Netscape Composer’s eccentric help system is amateurish and AOL-press’ is poorly thought out.
It’s hard to read the help screens for dialog boxes when they appear behind the dialog in the main application window.
Finally, we come to what to do with authored content when it’s ready for prime time – upload it to a Web server. Only Arachnophilia lacks this feature, though AOLpress works only with AOL’s servers and HomeSite relies on Microsoft’s Web Publishing Wizard, which you need to download from Microsoft’s Web site.
Without the wizard, you’d have to use a separate program, such as a File Transfer Protocol client, to upload documents to a Web server.
The write stuff In general, all of the tools we looked at worked (bugs excepted) and could be used effectively in a corporate environment to produce and modify Web content.
In choosing which products might be best for you, consider whether the product is too complex for your needs – you don’t want to have to institute major training programs to get your users up to speed – and how much support is available (obviously, free products have little or no real support).
Gibbs is president of Gibbs & Co., a consulting and analysis firm in Ventura, Calif. He is consulting editor to IntraNet magazine. He can be reached at mgibbs@gibbs.com.
Niche product alert
A number of low-end niche products let you accomplish specialized tasks easily and quickly. For example, InfoAccess, Inc.’s HTML Transit and SkiSoft, Inc.’s Web Publisher can convert legacy documents to HTML. Jalapeno Software Hot Buttons and Hot Banners make generating professional-looking buttons and banners a piece of cake.
New tools are coming out all the time. To keep track of shareware resources, turn to archives such as Tucows and Windows95.com. If you want to stay plugged in on a daily basis, subscribe to the comp.infosystems.www. authoring.html newsgroup.
How we did it
We tested all of these Web authoring packages on a ChatCom, Inc. Office Series 210 server with a 100-MHz Pentium PC with 32M bytes of RAM running Windows 95. Using each product, we created a small Web site that included forms, tables, frames and image maps. We tested all available template and wizard features.
If you have a tough time making decisions, be forewarned that there is abundant freedom of choice in the HTML authoring tools market. This segment of the software industry has gone from zero to wildfire in two years and shows no sign of a shakeout yet.
Today, the market is segmented along two axes. There are tools for Web authors of skill levels ranging from none to heavy programming and a new set of specialized tools for certain applications that are targeted at professional Web developers.
At the low end, you’ll find tools such as Microsoft Corp.’s Microsoft Word add-on, which lets you output HTML code from other kinds of applications, such as word processors and spreadsheets.
Other authoring tools for less sophisticated users, such as Claris HomePage and Adobe Systems, Inc.’s PageMill, provide WYSIWYG design capabilities, shielding you from having to learn the innards of obscure tags. Evan Quinn, an analyst with International Data Corp., of Framingham, Mass., sees this page authoring niche quickly becoming a commodity or freeware market. For expert coders, HTML tag editors such as SoftQuad, Inc.’s HoTMetaL Pro and Sausage Software’s HotDog Pro let you get into the meat of HTML code, but you need to know what you’re doing.
A step up in complexity, Web site design products such as Adobe’s SiteMill, Macromedia, Inc.’s Backstage, Microsoft FrontPage and NetObjects, Inc.’s NetObjects Fusion combine multiple tools with the ability to publish and manage a Web site.
For professional developers, rapid application development tools for the Web include script-based tools such as Borland International, Inc.’s IntraBuilder, Haht Software, Inc.’s HAHTSite, Microsoft Visual InterDev and Netscape Communications Corp.’s Visual JavaScript. We’ll be reviewing tools from this category in December. This category also includes object-oriented programming tools such as Asymetric Corp.’s SuperCede, Borland’s JBuilder, Sybase, Inc.’s PowerJ and Symantec Corp.’s Visual Cafe.
At the high end are enterprise development tools, such as Active Software’s ActiveWeb, Apple Computer, Inc./NeXT Software, Inc. WebObjects and Blue-stone, Inc.’s Sapphire/Web, that can create complex Web-based applications, but only in the hands of expert application developers.
The horizontal market spreads out in at least three ways. The most populous area is full of general tools such as the ones we profile in our Buyer’s Guide table (page 44). Two specialized areas are catalog or commerce builders and database access builders. Allaire Corp.’s Cold Fusion, Apptivity Corp.’s Apptivity Developer and Server, and Net-Dynamics, Inc.’s NetDynamics are among the premier tools for developing applications that make database information available to Web clients.
For commerce, tools that integrate online catalogs and “shopping carts” with Web-based payment systems include Forman Interactive Corp.’s Internet Creator, Speedware Corp.’s OrderPoint and a host of others.
If you’re developing typical Web sites, your HTML authoring tool kit should include a tag editor for detailed manipulation as well as a graphical tool.
Which tools you like may depend most on which end of the process is more important to you – building the page or publishing it. Some tools, such as NetObjects Fusion, are dynamite at quickly constructing sites with numerous pages in a consistent style. But when downloaded in a browser, the pages may be filled with multiple elements that take more time to download than you’d like. On the other hand, you can use a tag editor to write HTML pages that will download efficiently, but it will take a lot longer to place elements and to give multiple pages a similar look and feel.
With any package, look for features that enhance your coding productivity: predefined page templates, the ability to save pages as templates, conversion tools for Word and existing document formats, syntax highlighting in tag editors, search and replace functions across multiple pages, integration with a browser (to preview the pages you design) and a code validator, site management tools, a comprehensive tutorial and online help.
But keep in mind that validation is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it can catch inadvertent errors. But on the other, constantly changing standards could prevent you from including new tags or those that are understood only by certain browsers. A good HTML validator should only suggest corrections, not restrict your ability to write nonstandard code.
A publishing tool can be simple, perhaps providing only automatic File Transfer Protocol to a specified site. Or it can include nifty features such as checking your site and uploading only pages that have changed, which can be a big time-saver for very large sites. High-end tools may offer features such as access rights management and version control. Whatever your needs, there’s no doubt that you’ll have plenty of HTML authoring tools to choose from.
Market evolution
Web authoring tools tend to follow one of three designs representing the generations of the market. The first and oldest generation is represented by the tag editors. These tools offer editing of Web pages down at the level of HTML tags – that means you’ve got to know HTML inside and out. The relationship of the final look of the page and what you saw in your editor is tenuous at best.
The next generation of authoring tools introduced the WYSIWYG editors, where tags were hidden – or hideable – and Web pages looked more or less as they would in a browser.
The third authoring-tool generation focuses on building sites rather than just building pages. These tools include a whole range of utilities, including link checking, templates and Web development task management. While the third generation definitely is the most feature-rich and sophisticated, the products tend to overwhelm less expert users. These are the products we focus on in our Buyer’s Guide table because they’re what you need for an enterprise site.
Some editors allow very fine control of a Web page’s look and feel, while others remove much of the detail in the interest of quick development by nonexperts. But in most business settings, the reality is you need both. On your public Web site, you want top-end tools that can build and maintain a slick, commercial offering. On your intranet, you probably give the top-end tools to very few people while the rest get far more basic tools to support end-user publishing.
All generations of the authoring tools market can still be found in currently available products, and we brought in examples of all of them to test.
Where’s Microsoft FrontPage?
Microsoft Corp.’s FrontPage 97 certainly belongs in this evaluation of HTML authoring tools. However, a new version of the product is due to be released in just a few weeks. Because we already reviewed the current software (NW, Feb. 17, page 21), we decided to evaluate the new FrontPage 98 when it ships.
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Monday, September 29, 1997 12:00 pm | 
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