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Adobe GoLive 5

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Adobe GoLive 5

Price: Rs 17,872



Features
: Multiple palettes and views, support for all HTML objects and features, powerful prototyping tool



Pros: Excellent workflow features, great for people without coding experience


Cons: Links have to be handled manually; limited control over HTML


Contact: Adobe Systems India 


E-mail: hgoyal@adobe.com 


Address: D-107,
Sector 2, 



Noida 201301 




With packages such as Photoshop, Adobe is the undisputed leader when it comes to traditional graphic design but, unfortunately, it slept through the advent of the Internet. The company’s only Web design offering till recently was PageMill, and that left much to be desired. Macromedia promptly filled the gap with its Dreamweaver package. Adobe woke up just in time and brought up the well-regarded GoLive CyberStudio. While its launch of the renamed GoLive 4 was little more than a PC update of the existing Mac-only version, major changes in its latest release, GoLive 5, show that Adobe is finally ready to offer competition to

Dreamweaver.

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Working with GoLive

GoLive installs without any effort. The interface is intuitive and easy to use, especially if you have been using other Adobe products.

GoLive's approach is focused on the user's workflow. It works like this. You make an object, such as an image or table, and find the icon placeholder for that item in the Object palette. Now, drag this object into the appropriate spot on a page, select it, and you can modify it using the Inspector palette, link to an image, change its dimensions, set its properties, or change its format. 

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GoLive 5 offers seventeen floating palettes which are very useful during the various phases of site creation. The Table palette, for instance, offers a schematic proxy for selecting table cells. Choosing cells, rows, or columns (contiguous or not) in the Table palette selects the corresponding parts of the table on the page. This makes it much easier to work with complex tables without spending half your life moving the mouse in tiny increments trying to grab the precise edge of the right cell. You can also sort tables by rows, and apply (and capture) repeating designs for headers and cells. These tools alone reduce to minutes the time it takes to edit any page containing a table. 

When starting on a page in GoLive, you first bring up a Document window. A Document window contains six tabs, each corresponding to a different view of the page. The Layout Editor shows a rough browser-agnostic preview that's fully editable. The Frame Editor lets you drag, drop, and resize frames in a frameset. The HTML Source Editor provides a simple view of the underlying HTML. You can also use the new Source Code palette to simultaneously view or edit HTML with the Layout Preview displayed. The HTML Outline Editor chunks HTML into nested tabs that are useful mostly for troubleshooting. GoLive can also store stationery templates.

GoLive supports all standard HTML objects and features, including tables, frames, color, font sets, CSS, DHTML, JavaScript, Meta-tags, text formatting, and forms. GoLive uses CSS to create exactly positioned floating boxes, and it still has good support for layout grids, which use tables to stick things in a certain place on a page.

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DHTML support continues to be as easy as point and click, with a dedicated timeline allowing objects to be easily placed and moved. Previewing works perfectly, and the underlying JavaScript works on both Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator most of the time.

DHTML animations can be easily combined with GoLive Actions for creating sophisticated website elements. This is useful for non-programmers. GoLive integrates actions through a special Actions palette that lets you attach behavior to a mouse click, a key press, and the other standard JavaScript triggers.

The SmartObjects added in GoLive 5 include tools to link source files to Photoshop, Illustrator, and LiveMotion documents. Thus, you can directly modify the source art via GoLive's interface. GoLive resizes the image using the source art behind the scene, re-rendering the files as necessary, without requiring you to separately launch the creating program, modify the file, save it, and export it back. I was disappointed though, because I was expecting Dreamweaver-like objects, which are actually snippets of code that can be placed on a Web page.

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Dragging images other than GIFs or JPEGs into GoLive prompts the program to offer choices for conversion. This feature uses the standard Save For Web functionality offered in several Adobe programs. 

What’s good

GoLive has more under its hood than the average user will ever use. But with that power, it hasn't gone power-mad. The features are all easily accessible, and they don't intrude into your consciousness until you need them. A much-improved browser-based help guide lets you find step-by-step advice for particular tasks quickly. But you'll need that help less and less, because GoLive's consistency reinforces what you already know. 

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GoLive has excellent site management features, with a single interface, the Site window, handling all site features. The Files tab has all files and folders used in a site, exactly mirroring the contents of the local hard drive's organization. Files can be dragged in and out of this tab, new folders can be created, and objects or items can be moved up or down levels. 

Templates created by GoLive are reusable. Double-click a Stationery file and GoLive offers to create a new page with the template elements. Drag a Component from the Objects palette onto a page, and it copies the HTML while making a reference to the source. Changing the source updates every instance throughout the site. These two features help create an assembly line for crafting sites and later updating them. Making a Component out of a navigation bar allows changes in the navigation with a few clicks and a Save. 

External URLs and embedded e-mail addresses (using the ‘mailto:’ resource locator, to be technical) share the External tab of the site window, while colors applied as attributes and font sets invoked via the Font tag have respective Colors and Font Sets tabs.

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The Design tab contains the most powerful and extensive of the new features: A prototyping tool that allows a designer to easily ‘sketch’ out new sites or sections of existing sites by combining templates, links, and layout tools. Pages and sections can be dragged in, and link relationships can be added (to be placed into real links on the finished pages later).

The Design tab allows any site to contain multiple designs in progress, and each design can have elements that are separately linked to different areas of an existing site. A simple staging approach allows you to check designs into your existing site, or to recall them if there are problems. This whole structure offers a way to test ideas out quickly and easily, as GoLive tracks all the relationships, rewriting pages and links as you submit and recall designs.

GoLive includes various new site management features including WebDAV (Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning). Nowadays such collaborative working is becoming the norm for large sites. For these advanced, multi-author sites it’s also becoming common to tailor not just templates and library items but the program itself. WebDAV is a technology for exchanging and synchronizing files, much like FTP but with substantially more power or, conversely speaking, much like CVS (Concurrent Versioning System) but with substantially less power.

WebDAV works over HTTP. It integrates with Apache and other Web servers, allowing the system administrator to add it as an extra. It supports file locking and shared locks so that several people can work on a website at once while knowing precisely who has which files checked out. It also allows better two-way synchronization so that newer files from the server can be downloaded at the same time that local files can be uploaded. This is one of the best features the software offers.

GoLive includes a JavaScript-based SDK (Software Development Kit) complete with interpreter and debugger. The idea is to encourage third-party developers to introduce advanced functionality while letting workgroups take control of features such as custom palettes. The SDK is certainly a step in the right direction but it’s by no means as simple as Dreamweaver’s in-built macro recording.

The software also offers a Clean Up Site tool that carries out a number of housekeeping tasks. It can delete any files in the site that aren't referenced from any link descending from the home page or navigational hierarchy; and it can copy files from elsewhere on your local hard drive or network that are referenced by pages but not contained in the site's content folder. 

The Export feature offers three options for copying your site to a new folder. Export also offers ‘stripping’ features that can pull out GoLive-specific HTML, as well as extra white space and comments. 

And what’s not

GoLive lets you plan and build your site before going live, but links must still be handled manually. The software has plenty of options for building and applying Cascading Style Sheets and JavaScript, but it hasn't yet gone that extra mile to provide a full implementation of CSS; nor does it have debugging and programming tools for JavaScript. 

GoLive doesn’t let you use the site design to create automatic navigation links and rollovers in the way that NetObjects Fusion does. Initially this looks possible with the New Pages command which lets you specify automatic links to parent, child or sibling pages. Unfortunately these links aren’t actual but rather ‘pending’. In other words, you will be reminded to add them manually.

GoLive’s use of the Layout grid is great for non-coders and those for whom the visual impact of the page is more crucial than its download time, but there’s no reason why it shouldn’t offer good direct table handling too. Some features, such as the ability to sort by rows or columns, are impressive but generally the table handling still isn’t either as interactive or as easily controlled as it should be. GoLive still seems to see tables as an occasional add-on rather than the fundamental basis of a clean HTML layout.

Support for advanced media and dynamic data is important, but by far the most important capability for a Web authoring package is its HTML control. GoLive’s HTML editing is left to two alternative views–HTML Source and HTML Outline–in the Page window. Both of these provide powerful editing environments with advanced features such as code checking against browser profiles, color coding with URL and media file highlighting and so on.

Compared to Dreamweaver, however, with its roundtrip HTML, simultaneous page and code editing and its quick tag selection and editing, control is underpowered and awkward. Dream- weaver’s Tag Selector manages to fit the same functionality into the Page window’s status bar. More importantly, GoLive’s palette’s behavior is strange. For example it looks like you should be able to instantly select the link that the cursor is in and quickly copy it within the Source Code palette; bizarrely though everything is selected apart from the crucial surrounding tags!

Dreamweaver retains its coding edge, but there is one area of HTML functionality in which GoLive does move ahead. In the past, its Find and Replace was limited, but now the feature is fully HTML-aware. Using the new Element tab in particular opens up the ability to search for particular tags or tag attributes, with GoLive intelligently prompting you with all available options. With the Actions option you can then set whether the tag, its attributes or its content is changed. As parameters can be saved and reused, this means that you can automate common searches such as for IMG tags without ALT attributes.

Is GoLive 5 for you? It all depends. If you only dabble occasionally with website design and want lots of help putting pages together, then Microsoft FrontPage may be a better choice for you. For those who need the power of GoLive 5 or Macromedia Dreamweaver, which package will prove the best choice may depend largely on workflow preference. With Dreamweaver, you first figure out what you want and then fill in values; in contrast, GoLive allows you to drop in placeholders that can accommodate any kind of object anywhere, and then leave you to figure out the value later. 

All in all, most people updating websites on a day-to-day basis should find plenty to love in GoLive 5. It's focused on their needs. 

Swati Sani for PCQ Labs

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