Introduction

For the most part, Html Editors don't impress me. I have found that many of the editors available offer you some speed and WYSIWYG convenience but in return give you a bloated web page that is several times larger than the same page I can create in notepad. In addition many of the editors are cumbersome, with poorly designed or documented features. Some offer convenience in some areas and fail miserably in others. After frustrating forays with several editors -which shall remain nameless- I resorted to simply cutting and pasting and other time consuming -but somewhat dependable techniques.

Well here I am moving to a new server and I now have close to 400 pages and sub-pages on the site as well as several hundred files and a huge amount of internal and external links. I also had to convert most of these pages to ASP so that I could begin to use features like server-side includes and add some interactive pages. I began my dependable cutting and pasting. After a week had managed to change about 25 pages to the new format and guess what? I made a mistake which required me to go back over those darn pages again! I mentioned my frustration to Mike at Vbxtras and he told me that I should check out HomeSite 4.0 as it had many features that would make this easier. I was forced to admit that my 'tried and true' methods weren't going to cut it for a job this big so I decided to download the demo and try it out -after all this product has received rave reviews from the likes of CNET, PCWeek, SoftSeek, WinList and others.

I wasn't disappointed. While I may never completely shake my addiction to notepad, I am definitely hooked on HomeSite and it is now my main tool for creating and maintaining content on the Visual Basic Explorer web site. I won't give you an item by item description of the product -there is a fully functional 15-day trial available on the Allaire Corp web site for that. There are also excellent peer support forums on the Allaire site, an extensive and well organized online Help section included with the product and dozens of other reviews you can read to help you make up your mind or if all you want is a list of features. Instead I'd like to give you a quick run down of the features that I found the most useful as I redesigned my site. Keep in mind that these are the features that impressed me as a webmaster.  

Interface

Without a doubt this is the best laid out interface of any Html Editor that I have ever used and though this might not seem like a big deal to some, if you do as much editing as I do you will wonder how the heck you got along before this. A quick look will show you that the options -and there are a lot of them- are laid out in a neat and easily accessible manner.

Some of the features that I loved about the Editor were that you can assign different color schemes to different file types and highlight the various elements and tags however you wished. This makes it a lot easier to spot specific elements like comments and include statements in your code. It is also very convenient to be able to flip from Design Mode(WYSIWYG) to Edit(Html) and Browse Modes all within the development environment.

The Design Mode still needs some work. If you are just looking for a simple html editor with WYSIWYG abilities, an easy to use interface or something that will allow you to do basic stuff now and more advanced stuff later -and can do some basic editing of Html- this is still the tool for you. I personally wouldn't be interested in the product if all I wanted was a WYSIWYG editor but I'm assuming this feature will continue to evolve. To be fair I don't think any product that I have used so far produces perfect Html from a WYSIWYG editor and this product may be no worse than others in that regard. Still, if you can edit Html, it is still a good way to produce a quick layout of the major page elements which you can tweak in Edit view. I know my fellow notepad Html designers may kick me out of the club for that statement but hey, my time is worth something and having proved my stamina by editing hundreds of pages the hard way I won't mind using this feature when possible.

Features

The product is chock full of useful features large and small that together make this a great product. You can turn on line numbers, perform a spell check using the built in spell checker -or MS Word if it is installed. You can use the code validator to check the syntax of an individual tag or the whole document or use the Document Weight feature to calculate average download times for the elements of a page or site. Another big one for me was the ability to automatically test all the internal and external links on my site to make sure the are valid. With a total of several hundred links -maybe even several thousand- on the site, this tool in short order gave me a list of valid and invalid links with some additional information and a link to the resource. One minor problem was that this feature seems unable to handle ftp and news links.

Another useful feature that hopefully will continue to evolve is called Code Sweeper. You can use this to create custom formatting templates which can be applied automatically or when selected to the current document. This makes it easy to have a consistent format for your code and should prove extra useful when more than one person is responsible for creating pages. This feature didn't work perfectly every time -meaning it inserted a few extra tags here and there on some of my more complex documents- but it can only get better and I certainly am not an expert with this feature after only a week of testing.

HomeSite also supports version source control for those of you involved in team development and will automatically search your system and to detect supported source control applications.

Extended Find & Replace

This is undoubtedly one of my favorite features -probably since it saved me a lot of time. Remember when I told you about my ordeal of cutting and pasting new code to my pages only to find I had made a mistake? Well, HomeSite has a couple of great features called Extended Find and Extended Replace. Essentially these allow you to search across all or select documents on the site and perform a search or replace operation -and it's fast! I managed to change link and email information on about 300 pages in a few seconds. Doing this by hand would have been tiresome to say the least, and certainly error prone.

Big deal you say? Well get this. HomeSite also supports search and replace with regular expressions or regex.  This allows you to build complex expressions to precisely control the items you will find or replace. These expressions can get pretty intricate but taking some time learning to use this feature is bound to pay off.

Here's is an example from the book that is used to search for doubled words -for instance 'the the' or 'is is' in your text and replace them with '*'.

("This is is a test test string", "([A-Za-z]+)[]+\1", "*","ALL")

If this scared you, don't feel bad it did it to me too and it will probably be a while before I can do anything this complex. I did manage to get great help from the free forums on the Allaire site and managed to solve some problems with some coaching. When I began converting all the pages on the site to ASP I decided to take advantage of SSI. For those who don't know, server-side includes(SSI) allow you to place common code in a file and then place an include statement like this...

<!-- #include virtual="includes/HotButtons.inc"//-->

in your dynamically generated document which will make the server include the contents of this file (this is really useful as you now only have to change the contents of that one include file to have it reflected in all documents with the include statement). So first thing I did was to move the style information into an include file. Here is a shortened version of the contents of that file...

<STYLE>
<!--
A{
font-size:10pt;
color:teal;
font-family:times new roman;

}
P{
text-decoration:none;
font-size:10pt;
font-family:times new roman;
}
TD, TR, TABLE{
text-decoration:none;
font-size:10pt;
font-family:times new roman;
}
H1{
font-size:22pt;
color:#008080;
font-family:times new roman;

//-->
</STYLE> 

Then I did a quick Extended Replace of that whole block of code and inserted the...

<!-- #include virtual="includes/TealStyle.inc"//--> 

(before you mail me I know I could have used <LINK> but it's a long story) and guess what happened? Well, it turns out that the block of code between the Style tags on all of my pages was not exactly the same. Over time I had inadvertently changed an element here and there to solve a specific problem and since the code I was searching for wasn't exactly the same I wasn't able to replace all of the style blocks and figured I was going to have do it by hand.

Lucky for me I thought to ask for help on one of the forums on the Allaire site and a kindly soul suggested I just use the regular expressions . After I freaked out with the complex expression I showed you earlier...

("This is is a test test string", "([A-Za-z]+)[]+\1", "*","ALL")

this same individual showed my how a much simpler expression would solve my problem. I simply used <style>.*</style> and replaced it with the include statement. Within a few seconds it had scanned several hundred pages and replaced all of those code blocks for me. Considering this would have taken a heck of a long time the old way I promptly jumped from my seat and bowed several times to the HomeSite CD.

Still not convinced? Well, I'll give you one more of my favorite tools and then I'll call it a night or this will turn into a novel.

Code Snippets

How did I survive without this tool? I'm not sure, but it is certainly making life a lot easier lately. The idea is simple -most good tools are- save code and script that use use often so that it can be dropped into your documents. Sort of like a better organized, steroid enhanced, version of my old cut and paste. Here's a peek at the snippets pane with some of the categories and snippets I have created so far.

In my case many of my pages, like the product review and book pages, have repeating blocks of code. Rather than cutting and pasting the code every time I add a new product for example, I simply create a snippet that is a template for the new product. It looks something like this.

I inserted comments where there are values that I will have to insert, like the file name for example. Then you place the cursor where you want to insert the snippet and select the snippet option "Insert into documnet" and what you get is something like the following.

You can see how I have saved myself some work and insured a uniform appearance, by creating this reusable template. Now I can simply insert any required information where I have the red comments and I'm done. These snippets can also be used to do the same for blocks of JavaScript or VBScript. In fact there is a section on the Allaire site where you can get some premade snippets from your fellow HomeSite users.

Conclusion

So is that all? Not really, there are loads more features which make this a killer product. You can write scripts to automate features in HomeSite. The developers have exposed the object model so that you can customize it using JScript or VBScript. You can create custom tags. In fact using the built-in Visual Tool Markup Language (VTML) you can customize many of the features of the development environment. Power users can go crazy creating and modifying Wizards, Tag Tips, Tag Insight, Tag Editing Dialogs, Tag Outline Profiles and Tag Choser Elements. All this in addition to a host of friendly editing options that I haven't even discussed.

While I shudder to call any product perfect (as this attitude tends to ruin the best companies and products) I can say I think this is a dynamite tool and I believe that it represent an excellent value for the price. If you need an html editor/site manager I think your search is over -I know mine is. : )

You can get more product information by going to the VB Store on my site or jump from there to Allaire's Home Page.

Burt Abreu
02 February 1999