by Dave Ream

In their four-color upgrade promotion mailer for GoLive 4.0, Adobe's marketing wizards play on the dream of most every Web designer: to find a tool that synthesizes full code access and integrity with a WYSIWYG layout space. More than any WYSIWYG editor I've tried so far, GoLive 4.0 achieves that design dream and more, pushing further into advanced multimedia capabilities than many of us will ever need to go. But GoLive, for those who never knew it in its pre-Adobe life as GoLive Cyberstudio, is not just a WYSIWYG editor. It offers - with a few bugs left to work out - a wealth of site management features that are flexible and reasonably friendly to use.

Page Creation & Editing

I should reveal my bias before opining on GoLive's editing functions. As a Web designer who has had to create pages viewed in everything from Navigator to Lynx and served from three different platforms, I have developed a distinct lack of faith in the ability of WYSIWYG editors to predict browser behavior. I prefer instead to edit and manage sites with BBEdit and check them with the browser (and machine/OS) in question.

GoLive 4.0 may change all that for me. In the few weeks I've used it to edit and create pages, I haven't yet felt the need to go back to BBEdit to "clean up" the code. GoLive won my unprecedented confidence by doing two particular things well. First, it has a powerful and dynamic render-as-you-work relationship between its built-in code editor and the layout and preview modes of its WYSIWYG editor. Second, its overall interface is just plain friendly. Not friendly-hip in an innovative way like Dreamweaver, but friendly-familiar in an intuitive way. GoLive's look may not inspire you to love-at-first-sight, but it also isn't likely to seem dated in a few years.

GoLive's interface manages to keep most of its tools and controls visible most of the time, so that the user is constantly reminded that important tasks such as link analysis and syntax checking are only one click away.

On opening an HTML file, GoLive displays the page in a WYSIWYG layout format similar to that of Dreamweaver, revealing table structure, invisible objects, and icons representing element functions (e.g., a small but clear ship's anchor marks HTML anchors). To view a rendering of the page without all this "stuff", there is a preview mode, as well. Rendering in both is based on strict rules: even when set to evaluate syntax based on version 3 and 4 browsers, the editor and preview windows do not assume those browsers' default align=left for the left-positioned slice of a split JPEG graphic. Such strictness certainly promotes platform- and browser-compatible code and predicts the behavior of very strict browsers like iCab. However, since both IE and Navigator have idiosyncratic levels of permissiveness and/or one or the other set of "isms", designers who have been forced to find HTML work-arounds for complex formatting needs will still need to check the display in their browser. Like Dreamweaver, GoLive anticipates this need and provides a "show in browser" option in the main menu bar that allows you to view your file in any browser loaded on your system (that you have configured GoLive to communicate with).

The code editor workspace, as I mentioned before, is definitely a match for BBEdit. In fact, GoLive brings nice options to the tag coloring function that I've wished BBEdit would introduce, offering color schemes that focus on images and URLs for those times you need to scan a long page of code quickly for link problems.

Here are some other strengths I found in the overall interface:

Hot Help
GoLive has lots of tools. While nearly every icon is easy to identify, the hot help feature is a helpful annotator and guide when you're getting used to the application.

Tool Bar
Below the MacOS window bar, which includes standard access to file, edit, format, and window functions, is a "contextual" horizontal tool bar. In edit mode, it offers basic HTML buttons, while in site mode, it offers access to site-oriented controls, such as FTP upload/download, link updating and inspecting. In both modes, the tool bar offers quick toggle access to other open windows and browser preview.

Folder-tab Window Control
Below the tool bar, windows are topped with folder-tab selectors instead of pull-down menus, offering quick access to the various layers within the workspaces. For example, the edit window includes tabs that enable you to toggle quickly between WYSIWYG layout, code editor, and page preview.

Inspector The Inspector window offers a wealth of detailed information about every object, page, link, etc., selected in the main workspace window. This is the finest, friendliest execution of this interface concept I have seen -- even better than PageMaker's useful Control Palette.

Using GoLive in MacOS 8.5.1 on a PowerBook G3 Series 266Mhz with 128Mb of RAM, I did encounter one or two graphical artifacts and anomalies along the way, such as menus leaving behind blank squares when closed, that I couldn't get rid of by allocating more memory to the application. None of these impaired my use of the program and could very well be the fault of my system and not GoLive, but I will be interested to see if they go away (or get worse) under 8.6.

Site Management, Analysis & Navigation

There's mostly good news, but some bad news here. I found GoLive's site management functions to work as intended once I came to understand them; however, they have limitations that I would sum up with this advice: plan to break your site up into small sections before manipulating links or viewing site-maps. The same rule applies to the application's FTP functionality: GoLive is masterful at giving you a handle on dozens of files, but definitely not hundreds.

The FTP limitation was my only real time-wasting experience with this try-out. Using the PowerBook mentioned above, I attempted to download my department's nearly-100Mb site via GoLive's "New Site ... Import from FTP" utility over a 10BaseT LAN connection. The duration of the file transfer was 20 minutes, which is probably not unreasonable. However, GoLive crashed after three low-memory warnings as it was "building" the site locally on my hard disk. The low-memory warnings provided no opportunity for me to do anything about the problem. On my second attempt, I increased GoLive's memory allocation and selected a subset of the site - 280 files - for download. This time, there were no problems. The files were transferred and the site was built and mapped within two minutes. I do have an additional related complaint, though: the Import from FTP dialog box did not remember previous or "recent" servers, so I had to re-enter all the login information each time I reconnected.

Once the site was downloaded, I double-clicked on the site file icon that GoLive created to give me quick access to all of my files.

While the file view window came up tidy and intuitive, the site view layout just made me want to close my eyes and "use the force." It opens with all link paths open, revealing a comprehensive but overly expansive map.

When you close a file/link to free up some screen real estate, you then have to roll your mouse over it to remind yourself what was under or beside it (the rollover activates an animated, clickable triangle; depending on the file's position relative to other files, there may be several triangles oriented in different ways and in different positions). If this sounds confusing, then I'm getting across how clumsy this particular interface is. It is simply difficult to get a handle on an overall view of the site.

GoLive attempts to accommodate the need to see a broader view by giving a percent scaling control in the lower left corner, similar to that employed in Acrobat. I found this to be a completely useless tool, since scaling this view below 100% renders file names completely unreadable and the icons representing the files acquire a bad case of the jaggies, getting worse the smaller they get.

The link view was similarly unwieldy for groups of more than, say, ten files, and I found its graphical draw-lines-to-make-or-change-links capability to be clever, but not very practical for a site of any size.

Fortunately, the controls in the Site view's inspector window allow you to check an "Outline" box that converts the display to one that is far more manageable and intuitive for an entire site. Similar to Dreamweaver's default site view structure but more consistent with the MacOS hierarchical file display and more flexible, GoLive's outline view allows you to limit the display to just HTML files or to include images and URLs. If I could pick one thing to change in the next release, it would be to make this view the default view.

Summing Up

Web designers who manage small to mid-sized Web sites that employ advanced formatting, animations, or any kind of interactive application could get by very well using just GoLive and one Web-oriented image creation tool (Adobe's ImageReady & ImageStyler are obvious companions, but Adobe and Macromedia have worked together to make Fireworks GoLive-friendly with a downloadable template package.) If you manage a large site, GoLive is an ideal "hub" tool amidst the "spokes" of your existing specialized applications, but don't count on using it for your most demanding site management & link tracking tasks until you've gotten used to its idiosyncracies. That said, GoLive's wide range of functions, from fundamental to downright powerful, and its brilliantly intuitive editing and site outline workspaces make it well worth its $299 (or $99 upgrade/sidegrade) price.

Dave is a writer and Web designer for Stanford University's Information Technology Systems and Services division. He's a die-hard Mac advocate in an NT-infiltrated workplace and proudly serves his department's Web site from a PowerMac Server using WebStar. Fireworks and TextSpresso have renewed his faith that humans will teleport in his lifetime.