Side Box: What About Macs?

Realistically speaking, Macs are superior for designing web pages -- and as of Spring 1996 had designed 65% of the web pages in existence. It is much, much easier to design and publish web pages on the Mac than on the PC.

Even if Apple dries up and dies "shortly," the product cycle of the current Macs, etc. will take you long past the lifespan of Windows95 and Intel/IBM PC compatibles. Macs are even cost competitive now (finally).  With System 8 they are even back to full functionality and stability.  SystemX (as in NeXt Step, not "10") may even be better.

95% of you don't have Macs. But, if you do have a Mac, consider a Web Page a hypertext document and use a good Mac tool for HTML hypertext documents. http://www.macweek.com/mw_1043/rev_pagemill20.html will tell you all you need to know and more.  

The three leaders for web page development on Macs were:

1. Page Spinner
2. Claris Home Page
3. Adobe PageMill

The current leaders seem to be:

1. Adobe PageMill 2.0.  Supports frames and tables with powerful tools and has solid text handling capability.  True WYSIWYG frame set editing.
2. Claris Home Page 2.0.  Covers the basics, but contains some quirks.  Consistent with the Mac, with strong font support.  You will need a browser for true WYSIWYG.
3. NetObjects Fusion 2.0.  A port from the PC world. A complete site management tool that automatically generates navigational headers and footers for every page of your site. Frameset support (but, frames are generally a bad idea).  Recently discounted.
4. Bare Bones Software BBEdit.  Powerful HTML editing tools.  If you get another program, BBEdit is an excellent choice for a supplemental tool.  For a lawyer's content rich "text" style site, BBEdit is a strong choice.
5. Miracle Software Web Weaver.  A good training tool to learn HTML.  If BBEdit is too much a hacker's tool for your taste, Web Weaver is an excellent alternative.

.

The product you choose to use should basically fit your preferences (i.e. if you use Claris products, use Claris Home Page, if you prefer Adobe, then Page Mill).  

If you have no strong preferences, currently, PageMill 2.0 is the superior product, being extremely easy to use for beginners and containing an extremely powerful and complete feature set for advanced techniques and implimentations.  

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