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When Adobe released PageMill version 1.0 over a year ago, it was widely recognized as the only truly graphical HTML editor available on the Macintosh.
Following the WYSIWYG aspect of graphic design, PageMill 1.0 offered novices and experienced web designers alike the opportunity to concentrate on the design and layout of web pages instead of actually editing HTML code
in a text editor. That's not to say that PageMill version 1.0 was without its critics. Many people complained about the inability of version 1.0 to handle newer web technologies like tables, frames, Java applets and
Shockwave movies. Adobe Systems silenced all of its critics with the release of version 2.0 of PageMill. PageMill 2 not only addresses the missing features of Version 1.0, it adds truly exceptional controls for
implementing them. Creating tables, for instance, is a simple task consisting of clicking on the table button on the menu bar and dragging. As you drag, PageMill 2 clearly defines both table row and columns, allowing
you to precisely lay the table out in the HTML document.
Novice users will find that Adobe PageMill 2 is ideally suited for them. Extensive help, intuitive commands and the ability to drag and drop images
directly into a PageMill document will let novices quickly and easily create their own web pages. Link creation is superior. To create a link, simply select the text that will become the hyperlink and then drag the page
icon of the document to be linked on top of it. PageMill 2 even keeps track of directory structures and path addressing without bothering the user. |
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Adobe's new product also features the best frame making capabilities this reviewer has had the pleasure of using. Simply click the side of the window
that you want to create the frame from, hold down the Command (Apple) key and drag a new frame. This feature takes the most advantage of PageMill 2's WYSIWYG layout metaphor by allowing the designer to precisely orient
numerous frames and framesets in an editing environment.
PageMill 2 supports almost all of the latest HTML version 3.2 specification.Thanks to its HTML code editor, HTML programmers can easily create the majority of a
page in PageMill's visual editor and then go on to tweak HTML code manually. This is useful when adding the HSPACE and VSPACE tags around images and the FRAMESET BORDER="0" tag to turn frame borders off. The
ability of the HTML code editor to color code HTML command in blue, with everything else in black (except for comments, which are displayed in red text) also allows the programmer to more efficiently debug code.
The
program does have a few annoyances, however. Like its first incarnation, PageMIll 2 splashes Netscape's Navigator and
Microsoft's Internet Explorer, these tags make it difficult to debug HTML code in a text editor like Bare Bones Software's BBEdit
. Thankfully, in the tradition of the Internet, the "PageMill Cleaner" extension to BBEdit removes these annoyances. Importing
existing HTML pages and then saving them in PageMill 2 adds PageMill's extra commands throughout. Also, when entering a line break, PageMill uses the "P" and "/P" tags unless the user holds down the
Shift key when entering the command. A minor annoyance, perhaps, but these and others like it are the only things holding PageMill 2 back from being the only HTML editor serious web designers need on the Macintosh
platform. Professional web designers will certainly want PageMill 2 in the toolbox. With in-depth support for new plug-in formats (including Shockwave, QuickTime and Java applets) built right into the editor,
professional web designers will be able to save a lot of time. The built-in spell checker, find and replace feature (sorry, but these features are limited to the open document only; PageMill 2 does not support site-wide
changes yet) and download statistics generator (which is a nice feature that calculates the amount of time that the entire document will take to download on a user's computer at varying speeds) all add up to
professional level editing and creation abilities that any web designer would love. |
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continue review |
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