Well PageMill certainly surprised me. The HTML code it generated was as good, and perhaps better, than I could have done myself. When I laid in graphic files in GIF or JPG format, it left them in their original format (I found one Web Page Building program I looked at a few months ago that had the audacity to convert a JPG file to a GIF or vice-versa, and the resulting image looked worse than the original format), and it even determined the size of the graphic files, and included WIDTH and HEIGHT tags in the IMG SRC statements. This is very good HTML, because it tells the browser what size the graphic will be, even before it requests the graphic from the internet, so that the browser can leave a hole for the graphic, and continue formatting the text information that follows the graphic, before the graphic arrives.

It will even take a BMP file, which browsers generally cannot support without special plugins, and converts it to a GIF file, which browsers do support. The only thing along this line that I could criticize is that if one selects a TIF file, which browsers cannot directly support without special plugins either, it does not convert the file, but rather generates an EMBED SRC (instead of IMG SRC) statement and points directly to the TIF file. Since TIF files are so popular, and since many PageMill users may not be sophisticated enough to realize that TIF files needed to be converted, I would have preferred that it interrupt me and tell me that browsers usually cannot support TIF files directly, and ask me if I want it to make the EMBED SRC statement, or convert the graphic to one that could be handled by a browser.

PageMill can create tables, forms, image maps, and frames. It will let you set the alternate text specification for an image, so that a viewer that has images turned off to view web pages faster can see what the image would have shown, so that he will know whether to click on that image to view it. You can select one color in a GIF image and make that color transparent so that a GIF image will blend into the background color or pattern, rather than being a white box on a colored background. Using the Download Statistics dialog box you can even determine an image's size, and expected download time at different modem speeds, so you will have an idea how long it will take for a viewer to view your page.

PageMill has the normal find and replace feature that just about any word processor or DTP program has, except on PageMill, in addition to being able to find and replace text, you can do a find and replace on graphic images, links, or anything else PageMill works with, swapping one button for another, or changing all occurrences of one URL to another URL.

Rather than including image editing capabilities in PageMill, Adobe has included Photoshop LE, a light version of their award winning graphics program (and Paula Sander's favorite program).

Adobe Systems Incorporated
345 Park Avenue
San Jose, CA 95110-2704
http://www.adobe.com

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