Some Web authoring tools strike a balance between being completely visual a la PageMill, Tapestry, and GNNPress) and displaying nothing but raw HTML tags. These tools display HTML tags while trying to approximate what your page will look like when it's displayed in a Web browser, giving you a view that's half visual and half textual
Tonya Engst
World Wide Web Weaver 1.1, from Miracle Software, is a simple, useful HTML editor that helps authors think visually while editing HTML tags. For example, text defined as heading level 1 will appear in boldface and at a large type size, just as it would in your Web browser. HTML tags appear in a color and size all their own, so you can quickly tell tags apart from text.
Web Weaver supports several advanced HTML tags, including tables, forms, and frames. Creating forms and tables is an awkward process, but Web Weaver tries its best to offer a graphical preview of those page elements. Web Weaver can check your Web page to make sure you haven't used an HTML tag incorrectly, and you need not be left behind when new HTML tags arrive on the scene -- the program lets you add new tags to the tag checker.
Despite its slightly cramped interface, Web Weaver is a good product for creating individual HTML pages. It's accessible and easy to learn and a good pick for novices who want to learn HTML or for people who create Web pages on an informal basis.
SoftQuad's HoTMetaL Pro 2.0 is a powerful HTML authoring tool that's hampered by an ugly, hard-to-use interface. Like Web Weaver, HoTMetaL Pro shows tags and text in different styles and approximates how text will look when it's displayed in a Web browser.
HoTMetaL Pro can preview documents in any installed browser, although the interface is strange. Unlike other Web authoring tools we've seen, HoTMetaL Pro doesn't let you edit HTML tags directly: Tags appear as objects within your document, making it easy to differentiate between tags and document text. However, treating tags as objects means you must use dialog boxes to edit them. HoTMetaL Pro's strong rule-checking feature watches carefully to ensure that authors are creating valid HTML documents, although rule checking can be turned off if it becomes too obtrusive.
When it comes to defining the colors of your Web document, HoTMetaL Pro is very unfriendly: Most Web authoring tools provide you with a color wheel to help select colors, but HoTMetaL Pro forces you to calculate the hexadecimal RGB value of each color and then type that value in.
Aspiring to be more than a mere text editor, HoTMetaL Pro offers several tools more commonly found in word processors. However, we found its spelling-checker interface mediocre, its thesaurus unimpressive, and its outliner completely inscrutable. The program also offers a sophisticated find-and-replace capability, including a poorly documented pattern-matching feature.
Despite its problems, given how much SoftQuad improved HoTMetaL Pro 2.0 over the out-and-out awful HoTMetaL Pro 1.0, we can't wait to see if this rate of improvement continues with version 3.0, which should be available soon.
World Wide Web Weaver 1.1
A simple HTML editor that's a good pick for novices who want to learn HTML.