HomeSite 4.0 Released
by Dave Murphy
ISSN 1535-3613

Allaire has released HomeSite 4.0, a major upgrade to the winner of DGL's "Must Have" website development tool. The following questions and answers are excerpted from Allaire's HomeSite 4.0 FAQ.

How is HomeSite 4.0 an improvement over HomeSite 3.0?
HomeSite 4.0 will enable Web developers to build great Websites even faster than with HomeSite 3.0. Areas of improvement include new code features, the Site View, quality control feature improvements, the Design View, more extensibility and customization options, and support for the latest Web technologies.

What are the new code editing features?
The new code-centric features include the Tag Inspector property sheet, the Tag Tree page structure view, color-coding scripts, the Cascading Style Sheet editor, and the JavaScript wizard.

What is the Design View?
Along with the code-centric Edit View and the Browse View for previewing pages, HomeSite 4.0 has the Design View, a visual development environment for creating and editing pages. Users will find the Design View productive when creating prototypes, laying out pages, and making quick edits. The Design View is not meant to be the main development environment.

Why is Internet Explorer 4.01 required for the Design View?
HomeSite uses a feature in Internet Explorer 4.01 to create the Design View that is not available in Internet Explorer 3.0 or any version of Netscape Navigator. Creating the equivalent functionality for other browsers would be a huge amount of work.

How is the Site View used?
The Site View gives a bird’s eye view of the entire Web site. Users can choose the chart style or the tree style in Site View. Link Verification results will also be show in the Site View.

How have the quality control features been improved?
Link verification now works with proxy servers. Spell checking improvements include indication of errors in the Edit View, replacement suggestions (upon right click), and integration with Word dictionaries. We have also rewritten HTML validation adding single tag validation and automatic validation.

What is the CodeSweeper?
The Code Sweeper applies a pre-defined set of formatting rules to an HTML page. This is especially useful when importing pages from other tools. HomeSite comes with a default set of formatting rules and users can create their own rulesets.

What are the new extensibility/customization features?
Users can create macros that automate tasks in HomeSite. The macros can be written in VBscript or JavaScript in HomeSite itself. HomeSite now support user defined hot-keys for HomeSite tasks and tag snippets. The toolbars in HomeSite can be docked.

What new Web technologies are supported?
Support for SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) is now included in HomeSite. There is also a new Cascading Style Sheet editor.

Anything else new?
There are many other improvements including: private/public Tag Snippets; improved performance when opening, closing, search & replace, etc.; new printing method; improved FTP capabilities; integration with source control tools; interoperability with MSIE, Word, and Excel; A full list of HomeSite 4.0’s new features can be found in the Release Notes included with HomeSite 4.0.

Allaire's website

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updated October 19, 1998
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