Allaire's HomeSite 4.0
Part 2
By David Fiedler
What's New in 4.0?
Allaire has seemingly done the impossible. They've made HomeSite 4.0 not only more powerful and more comprehensive, but also faster, especially under Windows 95 and 98, due to a different method of allocating resources and heavy use of DLLs.
In the process, they've even added a semi-WYSIWYG "Design View". While this isn't a perfect representation of the page, it's not meant to be pretty, it's meant to be functional. And indeed, while it won't replace FrontPage for the casual user, HomeSite's Design View allows a harried page designer to quickly modify parts of a page without having to drop back to HTML all the time. And best of all, it actually shows you where the table boundaries are!
When you are in HTML mode, you're also in HTML heaven. Aside from HomeSite's well-known single click commands for most often-used tags and operations, you now have configurable color and font coding for syntax of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, VBScript, SQL, ASP, PHP3 and Perl documents. You can open files, locally-defined projects (which can be mirrored by HomeSite to your server with built-in FTP), or pages right off the Web. Even this has been improved, with thread-based file listing.
Editing...with Style
There's also a Cascading Style Sheet editor, which is actually a separate program, though integrated into HomeSite. This alone is almost worth the price of HomeSite; it shows everything you do in instant preview mode!
And as long as we're talking about style, you can define your own "house style" for HTML in CodeSweeper, which will indent, skip lines, or whatever you want, based on the way you prefer code to look...and you can configure it tag by tag. This is actually one of those "turn a bug into a feature" things, since Design View will sometimes reformat code; this lets you restore your own style automatically. If that isn't enough, you can save a document as a template, where it becomes a live "style guide" for future documents!
Even the user interface lets you do your own styling...dock or undock the toolbars, move the browse view around, or whatever you like. If that isn't enough, you can define your own custom wizards. And did I mention the most powerful global search and replace feature I've seen in a Windows-based HTML editor?
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This article first appeared in October, 1998.
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