TCS - Page Mill 3.0

Page Mill 3.0

by Don Singleton
Tulsa Computer Society
From the May 1999 issue of the I/O Port Newsletter

Adobe’s PageMill began life on the Mac as one of the very first of the no-code Web editors, designed to put a friendly interface on the Web’s underlying HTML code. It first arrived on the PC in version 2.0, and I was very impressed by it. Page Mill 2.0 generated cleaner HTML code than many of the other WYSIWYG web page tools. You could easily create and manipulate frames, draw image-maps, check spelling and find-and-replace files. It also would sometimes tamper with pre-written HTML, however I still prefered over most of the competitors, particularly Microsoft's Front Page.

Now, with PageMill 3.0, Adobe has included the previously separate SiteMill site management tool, a cut-down version of its renowned Photoshop image editor, and a swag of media clips, Java applets and CGI scripts (although the support of those in terms of being easy to use, is somewhat lacking).

Layout and page design is child's play with the newly streamlined interface of PageMill 3. You can drag and drop design elements from the tool bar, or from the Finder itself, onto a page. Tables are extremely easy to place, define and modify, as are interactive forms. PageMill 3's new custom color palette lets you store 16 colors from the Web-safe palette of 216, and you can drag and drop these onto any element. This is a convenient way to manage a site's visual consistency.

One feature, which I have read about in the Mac edition, but which I could not find in the PC edition, is the capability to preview a page and view its source code simultaneously (in the PC version you have to turn source code on and off with the View menu). When viewing in source code mode, the display uses red and blue for the HTML tags, and black for the text that is visible on the web page, just like UltraEdit which I covered last month.

Unlike previous versions, PageMill 3 now respects custom HTML, and you can easily prevent PageMill from inserting its own proprietary HTML tags. However, there are no drag-and-drop meta tags for keywords, for example, which means you have to enter these in HTML source code.

The HTML code it generates is still one of the cleanest of any WYSIWYG editor I have tried, including Front Page, which is one of the worst for sticking in strange tags. This is somewhat surprising, because Adobe Page Maker 6.5, while being the best DTP program I have ever used, generates absolutely terrible HTML when you tell it to do so.

PageMill does not support Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) or Dynamic HTML (DHTML), however I do not consider that a terribly severe restriction, because I like to avoid using things like CSS, which are only available in some Browsers, because they fequently make the web page look even worse when viewed by someone with an old browser.

The most disappointing thing I found is that when I tried to open many of the web pages on the Tusla Computer Society's web site, most (but not all) of them did not show graphics.

For example on our main web page,

<IMG ALT="Tulsa Computer Society" ALIGN=RIGHT SRC="tcslogo72a64.gif" WIDTH="425" HEIGHT="229"> did not display the TCS logo. When I clicked on it and had it pull the file up from the hard disk, it did display it, and I saved the code at that time, which was:

<IMG SRC="Tcslogo72A64.gif" ALT="Tulsa Computer Society" ALIGN="RIGHT" WIDTH="425" HEIGHT="229" NATURALSIZEFLAG="0"></TD> and it worked as modified when I subsequently reloaded it.

Still on the main page <A HREF="http://www.virtuocity.com/family.html"> <IMG ALIGN=RIGHT SRC="family_s.jpg" ALT="Family-Friendly Site" BORDER=0></a> worked, as did <A HREF="http://www.safesurf.com/"> <IMG BORDER=0 SRC= "safewave.gif" ALT="SafeSurf Rated All Ages"></a>

Looking at the I/O Port page for articles in 1999, <td rowspan=4><img src="ribbontcs1.gif"></td> did not work

<TD ROWSPAN="4"><IMG SRC="ribbontcs2.gif" ALIGN="BOTTOM"></TD> did not work

but when I told PageMill where the ribbon was, and let it save the HTML code <TD ROWSPAN="4"><IMG SRC="ribbontcs1.gif" WIDTH="100" HEIGHT="245" NATURALSIZEFLAG="3" ALIGN="BOTTOM"></TD> worked as modified.

What is unique about it? When I save a PageMill file, they include the NATURALSIZEFLAG tag, which I have never heard of before, but the family_s.jpg and safewave.gif images came up and they did not have it, and I tried adding it to some other tags, and that was not enough.

Despite this annoyance, if you require a WYSIWYG Web Page Layout Tool, I strongly recommend Page Mill, but I think you will learn HTML better if you capture a few web pages you like, and study their code using an editor like UltraEdit.

Adobe PageMill 3.0 for Windows
Any 80486 or greater processor
Microsoft Windows(R) 95 or Windows NT(R) 4.0 or later
16 MB of RAM for Windows 95 or Windows NT
20 MB of available hard disk space
VGA (8-bit or higher) or higher-resolution monitor, 800 x 600 recommended
CD-ROM drive
Adobe Systems Incorporated
345 Park Avenue
San Jose, CA 95110-2704
http://www.adobe.com



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Tulsa Computer Society 4/19/99
Don Singleton, President
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