bitsifter
friday, july 05

[sift this]  Common misception -- your web browser and your word processor are birds of a feather.  Microsoft will tell you otherwise only because they're shaking in their boots realizing that folks are giving up Word in favor of web editors like Navigator Gold, but does not make them the same.

Word processor text is a representation of what you see whenyou open a book or a magazine.  Static text, static images. Little user interaction. HTML is dynamic, if you don't believe me, resize this window and watch how this column changes. Better yet, visit CyberDungeon.  It's the interactive age, folks... or so you thought.

Two of my current favorite electrozines, Suck and Slate ,unintentionally ask the question, "When is a webzine like a magazine?" A quick visit to both of these sites reveals they're reliance on the age-old "column" format -- Mrs Wickett (who is now divorced) taught us in Journalism that the column format (~7 words across) is easy to read, but she also warned us to never waste the white space.  Suck and Slate are laden with white space where columns should live, I spend more time scrolling than reading.  Suck takes it a step further and employs the old "This report has gotta be eight pages long or the prof won't accept it" double-space trick.

The answer is: a multicolumn HTML tag in the recent BETA 5 version of the Navigator from Netscape . This container tag will allow white space suckers to fill their pages with content by allowing specification for number of columns, the gutter width, and the column width. So, who's first?

[sift this] The only product from Claris that I've used on a regular basis is FileMaker Pro, a flatfile database product that has somehow eeked it's way into the hearts of quality assurance teams as a bug tracking system.  Stop laughing.

An Adobe tip lead me to the Claris site for the first time -- it appears that Claris had purchased a product code-named Loma Prieta (a mountain in California noteworthy for an earthquake in the late 80's) that was a competitor for Adobe's web editor, PageMill. Renaming the product Home Page, Claris has recently released a BETA of the product.

The Claris product line represents easy to use (read: low tech) applications akin to Microsoft Works -- the company slogan -- "simply powerful software".I tend to avoid Claris because of this, but the fact is the WYSIWIG web editor market is currently wide open. Netscape and Microsoft are creating HTML extensions so fast, their own editors can't keep up. Maybe Claris has a chance.

And they do. Home Page has the underpinnings of a great WYSIWIG web editor. Probably the biggest frustration web developers have with the pages is getting tables to look right. Netscape Gold does provide table support, but being unable to resize tables and cells with the mouse is hardly useful. Home Page sports wicked table editing and goes even further by intelligently implementing the ROWSPAN and COLSPAN tags which means you'll spend less time tweaking the code and more time worrying about the content.

Other features include a modal object editor dialog which displays all the relevant attributes for the currently selected object, a frame editor, an image map editor, and library object which allows users to add clip-art or boilerplate text.  The Windows versions lacks many of the spiffy Win95 features like right-click pop-up menus and customizable toolbars, but you'll get over it.

Claris has done the inevitable, made a web editor that feels like a development environment.

[rant] From our "Everything I knew to be true is wrong" department, this quote from PC WEEK Online (July 1):

"Release candidates [of NT 4.0] are mainly testing vehicles for production, and the release of RC 1 confirms sources' claims that the development of NT 4.0 is on or ahead of schedule for a late August release."

If this report is true, I would like to be among the first to thank Netscape for achieving what millions of frustrated end-users have been unable to do -- get Microsoft to adhere to it's own schedule.