Adobe GoLive 4.0
GoLive 4.0 may not offer the ease-of-use and automation that FrontPage 2000 does, but it is one of the most powerful choices for professional Web development. Whereas FrontPage 2000 is a boon for all newcomers, GoLive caters more to the pros, especially those making a switch from the Mac OS to Windows. This does not mean that newbies would be hopelessly lost with GoLive-it might just take them a little more time to get the hang of things.
GoLive is a visual design tool for professional designers, who are increasingly bringing their design expertise to the Internet. It empowers this new generation of Web professionals to author the most sophisticated Web sites imaginable, without requiring them to resort to complex programming languages or arcane codes. GoLive combines the pixel-level control that designers have come to expect from their traditional publishing tools, with sophisticated site management that makes it easy to create and maintain Web sites. It is a natural complement to a standard toolset that includes Adobe Illustrator for vector design, Adobe Photoshop for manipulating raster images and Adobe ImageReady for processing images.
GoLive alleviates the pain of working with HTML code, letting you work in Layout Mode to see exactly how your designs will look on different platforms and browsers. Designers can position design elements precisely, knowing that the elements will stay as placed. This ensures that visitors to the sites will see the designs exactly as intended, with page integrity across browsers and platforms.
GoLive implements Adobe PDF as an integrated component of its Site Management, allowing users to instantly view and check, correct and update links in PDF documents directly from the Site Window without opening the source file. It takes care of the details often missed when small changes are made. The link parser has virtually unlimited access to the URLs on the HREF tracks of QuickTime movies and URLs in PDF and PGML files, monitoring them for broken links and rewriting internal URLs when a link or file reference is changed.
Designers can now save time trouble- shooting missing files from within the Site Window with a new Find shortcut on the contextual menu. Users can control-click on a missing file item in the Error tab in the right pane of the Site Window. This provides better site management by allowing users to troubleshoot missing file problems.
The Cascading Style Sheets editor allows you to save external style sheets, imported style sheets, classes, IDs and tag selectors, position and overlap floating layers on Web pages as well as apply styles in four ways: characters, paragraphs, sections and areas.
GoLive comes with a studio of editors that provide a seamless, integrated working environment. Editors include Site View, Visual Layout, Source Code, Web Database, JavaScript, CSS, DHTML Timeline, QuickTime, Color Palette and the Context Inspector.
The QuickTime editor allows designers to bring their own quality QuickTime movies to the Web and edit them using a full range of QuickTime 3.0 multimedia tools. Users drag and drop any combination of audio and video elements, transitions, sprites, MIDI and HREF tracks to create new QuickTime movies or edit existing ones. It has a completely redesigned QuickTime Inspector and a built-in QuickTime movie viewer. GoLive4.0 is the only application that lets users edit movies from within a Web publishing Program.
GoLive recognises XML for the structured presentation of information on the Web. It reads XML markup, writes it to back to file without any changes and lets users inspect and hand-edit existing XML declarations and tags. It also enables users to inspect and edit ASP code, including JavaScript, VBScript, Visual Basic for applications, and other proprietary languages for control over Internet Explorer and ASP. The Foreign Item Inspector gives users maximum flexibility with custom code. It appears when users click on a non-HTML item, allowing them to edit and preserve non-HTML code found anywhere in a page. GoLive preserves hidden non-HTML publishing solutions, giving users the power to make their ideas stand-out exactly as they intend.
New with GoLive, Actions Plus 1.0 contains 14 JavaScript actions. They include shows, daily redirects, forced frames, remote window targeting and even password protection. GoLive makes it easier than ever to work with tables-you can even select and format multiple cells. With the exception of table editors in word processors, the cells selected do not need to form a contiguous block. Users simply shift-click to select multiple cells in a table, and apply colours, font sets and relative font sizes.
On the flip side, it was surprising that some common Web objects-Macromedia Shockwave and Flash animations-get little support in GoLive. You can still employ these objects on your site, but GoLive lacks the tools to insert them into your pages, so youÆll have to do it manually. Even then, GoLiveÆs preview mode wonÆt display them. Moreover, though the QuickTime editor is a great addition, the lack of support for Real NetworksÆ streaming media technology is odd, given its widespread popularity, particularly among Windows business users.