“I put up my review for iWeb, the newest part of iLife from Apple Computers. My enitre personal page was designed with iWeb and a few royalty free images I found scattered around the web to give it an atmosphere that I haven’t been able to create before on my own. To be honest, I’m not big on web developing, so for anyone who wants to just build a small homepage, this is for you.”
iWeb Review
About The Author
Adam Scheinberg
Technology Executive • Web Developer • Father • Foodie • Music Snob • OS enthusiast
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OMG, All the text is an image! Next to nil accessibility (Try View > Page Style > None and enjoy) and a bandwidth-killer. I don’t even need to read the review to know iWeb outputs some real crap code.
Edited 2006-01-28 13:48
Webpage has been fixed back to normal text now if anybody is wondering what I’m talking about. It was several big images of the text before with glow around it.
I really hope iWeb can produce better websites than this. The text as images seems like the same horrible way MS publisher 97 mad webpages.
I was mainly showing it off as much to be a media rich page, I’ll change it all back to regular text soon, I should have thought about that before submitting this to OSnews.
I wasn’t showing it off to the world that way mind you, just to a friend who’s really into heavy duty web stuff.
Edited 2006-01-28 14:23
Regardless, iWeb itself should know better than to turn text into images and use a grain of intelligence like using a background image on a DIV containing the text and then using CSS to hide the text.
iWeb appears to be as bad as MSPUB, I was hoping for something better, but it appears not so.
Okay, it’s back to regular text. Just check it out again if you were disappointed at all.
I’m a Golive, Dreamweaver user and I have been waiting for Apple to do this, because they always do it the Apple way and I like that. I want to make simple personal pages in minutes instead of days.
looks great!
I went to w3c.org and ran the HTML validator and this code is XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant. Publisher could never do that.
Gah, validation means nothing! Any real webdesigner (read: uses notepad to code) knows that the validatior does not check for 508 compliance, and cannot validate the intelligence of the code.
It uses hundreds of [div class=”paragraph… instead of just [p] tags! It doesn’t use H1, H2, H3 etc. This code is not semantic and fails miserably at conforming to the standard.
That is the most arrogant thing I’ve ever heard. Real programmers use Notepad? Pshaw. Using Notepad doesn’t make you elite, it makes you clueless. What you probably mean is writing code vs. using a code generation program. Most Windows progams you use were probably written in Visual Studio, by the way.
I used to use Notepad to write HTML, and then I found the plethora of Text Editors/IDEs that do syntax coloring.
For Windows, try http://pnotepad.org (OSNews itself was almost entirely written in this app)
For Mac, try http://smultron.sourceforge.net or http://barebones.com (OSNews is currently maintained in these two apps)
For Linux, try Bluefish, http://bluefish.openoffice.nl (Parts of OSNews were written in this app)
Thanks for the direct attack, real professional.
By “use notepad” I was generalizing about hand-typing specifically without having to name a huge list of text-editors, when people who use dreamweaver/iWeb get the idea when I say just “notepad”. If your text editor colours syntax you are still typing the code by hand regardless. Your attack is semantics and nothing more.
The most important point here is that using your noggin’ and experience to write code is better than just saying a page validates and is thus “good code”. We all know that iWeb is outputting some awful unsemantic rubbish under the guise of clean code to the uninformed via xHTML validation.
Edited 2006-01-28 15:43
Down, boy. It was just a comment.
You slammed the author of the web page (who is clearly commenting in this very forum). I think what you said – that real programmers can’t use assisted development programs (or possibly any RAD tools), and what you implied – that iWeb and similar apps are somehow “bad” because they encourage the less technical to participate, is both exclusive and pompous. That’s not a “direct attack,” it’s just my opinion. No need to freak out.
There’s really nothing wrong with these programs at all. If you prefer to do it by hand (as I do), great. But don’t slam everyone else for using the software. That simply IS arrogant.
“iWeb and similar apps are somehow “bad” because they encourage the less technical to participate, is both exclusive and pompous”
No, nothing wrong with the less technical participating, that was why Sir Tim Berners Lee invented the WWW. He never thought that people would ever actually want to write the codes by hand and that WYSIWYG editors existed from the very very beginning.
My complaint is that these editors should be more intelligent, because the lack of attention by Apple and other WYSIWYG editor developers is polluting the web with documents that cannot be read by the disabled and that are limited in use outside of Winodws & MSIE (excluding iWeb, kudos to Apple)
I gave a valid example – instead of making images for the text, a background image should have been created of the text and the real text hidden by CSS so that without the images the page is still readable (and importantly googlable).
I am annoyed by the lack of care of the WYSIWYG developers, not the less-technical because we were all less-technical at some point.
no editor puts out “clean code”, just look at Frontpage.
Yeah if you want to make simple pages, sure use your “notepade”. Are you going to make a Flash animation or a Flash site for a client in “gay” notepad? Or CSS? I don’t think so.
iWebs good enough for what it does and a average user can make a nice home page with it with ease, and it looks good.
Actually, you can validation Accessibility Compliance:
http://www.miislita.com/searchito/accessibility-validator.html
If you are simply a home user who wants an easy way to post a photo gallery of give simply text updates with a snazzy yet templated design then this program is ok however even thought it may be conform to the standards doesn’t mean it’s good. I am on a high speed DSL connection it all of the iWeb pages I have seen thus far have taken way too long to load. I agree with the above statement that is is a lot like publisher except the results are better looking and it’s intergrated with iLife which it a positive feature but that is about it.
I have tried other wysiwig OSX based web design tools and so far the one that I’m most impressed with is Rapidweaver;
http://www.realmacsoftware.com/rapidweaver/index.php
A few other things that bother me about iWeb is it seems they are just making an Internet version of their consumer based desktop publishing program called Pages. While it looks good, some thing like fast loading pages are better for the web and BTW, that “reflected photo effect” is going to get old mighty fast.
I am becoming disturbed by the degree to which everyone is obsessed with HTML structure above all else. It’s really not the most important thing here.
That the code is well-formed (and, apparently, compliant) XHTML is great because that makes it parseable and portable. (iWeb-cleaning XSLT, anyone?) But the fact that it uses <div> instead of <p>, <h1>, etc. shouldn’t be the focus of a critique. (I haven’t used iWeb, but I’m guessing it’s because users don’t select styles but rather fonts, so there’s no way for the app to tell which tag to use.)
Apple is putting into the hands of non-technical users the ability to create decent-looking, usable, media-rich pages and blogs. The code is clean if not 100% ideal, and the vast majority of the time no one is going to care except for academic reasons. The important fact here is that someone with basic Word processing skills can put up a decent Web page. To let the details of the HTML structure overwhelm an evaluation of that seems to me to miss the point.
When you are blind, visually impaired or in someway disabled and are forced to use screen-reading or a minority browser you will understand the importance of H1/P over lots of DIVs. Until then you will remain blissfully ignorant (as I) at no fault of your own.
The semantics of HTML are worth 10 times correct validation.
Oh and to protect against the “the disabled don’t matter” arguments, here’s some real world examples of semantics at play.
If a document uses semantic code, marking up headers as headers, paragraphs as paragraphs, it is easy to manipulate and control and re-skin and distribute to any number of useragents, idependently of CSS, via RSS.
A H1 is still a H1 even if you use a FeedReader, Firefox, Lynx or a Mobile phone. If instead, you utilised a {div class=”heading”} there would be no way for an RSS reader to know that was the heading and style it according to your FeedReader’s CSS choices. It would have to use the CSS from the website to style it, causing horrible mismathes in your RSS Reader.
Additionally many mobile phone browsers have very limited CSS support and sometimes None. It would be very difficult to read a document if all the headings were plain text the same as all the paragraphs because DIVs were used for it all. In fact, it’d be an utter nightmare.
Documents that use correct semantics are super fast to re-skin because you do not rely upon a slew of HTML classnames and ids that are unique to the site it came from. Everybody uses different class names for various things, so to be able to copy from a wikipedia article, paste into your HTML and have it instantly skin iteslef to your site because the H1s are defined in your CSS without the need for remapping hundreds of class names.
Semantics make HTML machine readable. If software can understand what text is a paragraph and what is a heading this opens up lots of possibilities of the machine understanding the actual content and meaning of the page. Search engines could cross reference the headings with the paragraph text to determine relevance, or use the heading to pick out particular articles on one webpage, and then syndicate that information to a 3D visualisation of an Article Map like they have on C|NET.
All of this impossible without semantic HTML.
It’s also worth remembering that the world’s largest and most important reader of the web is itself blind: Google. Good semantically correct markup will dramatically increase the ranking of your site.
iWeb may put difficult web coding in the hands of the masses, but from the provided example, it seems like it needs to offer some better templates as well. If that’s the average kind of page it outputs, then you’re really not much better off than you were before. Soft, white drop shadows are a definite design no-no.
You all may claim that accessibility is harmed by having text instead of images, but at this moment, I’d say the exact opposite is what I’m experiencing.
The text on the page starts normal sized, has a few lines with screwed up leading, then it seems each paragraph beyond the first has a different text size and each overlaps the others so that by the bottom you have at least 3 or 4 sets of text in 36 point Arial all right on top of each other.
And image may be useless to a blind person, but to me, it’d at least enforce readability.
You all may claim that accessibility is harmed by having text instead of images, but at this moment, I’d say the exact opposite is what I’m experiencing.
The text on the page starts normal sized, has a few lines with screwed up leading, then it seems each paragraph beyond the first has a different text size and each overlaps the others so that by the bottom you have at least 3 or 4 sets of text in 36 point Arial all right on top of each other.
And image may be useless to a blind person, but to me, it’d at least enforce readability.
You’re still missing the point. If you’re having problems reading the text because of the font face chosen or anything else, you still can see the page by using something like Opera, that allows you to impose a custom CSS to the page that you’re viewing. That way, you can change font face, size, color and other attributes to your liking. Blind or vision impaired people still can use their screen readers. That’s only possible because you have text content to handle.
With images on the other hand, there is no way to do that (in a practical fashion, I mean. Maybe someone will improve current OCRs to be used as some sort of screen reader… Who knows? :-)). When the author opts for antialiasing the characters on the image, it might “blur” too much small types thus making it almost unreadable even to people with good sight. And there is no way around that.
I built that entire site using default templates, and nothing more. However, I’ve worked on my main site which isn’t uploaded yet using a more advanced way of handeling things, also taking advantage of a top menu bar. It’s rather nice, and you can view it at http://www.yoursoapbox.org/ysb/ if you want to. It is graphical, for it’s meant to visually impress people.
Like I said, I’m too busy to deal with HTML now, I’m not a child with hours to spare on these things (not to say that all HTML users are children). If I did professional web development, I sure as $|-|it wouldn’t be using iWeb. Like many have said already, this is for home users wanting to build a quick easy page.
Even Steve Jobs said it was for people to share with their family in an easy way their movies, photos, blogs, etc.
this is what i use http://www.talacia.com/products/tag/index.html its cheap and for me it does what i want.
lets hope they are hard at work on 2.0.
This is like all the people (Thurrot I’m lookingat you) who fell all over themselves comparing Front Row to Windows Media Center. Even though WMC is a POS it’s in it’s third iteration whereas Front Row is basically a first stab at a Media Center. When Apple gets serious about it you’ll know it. iWeb is a first try at a simple Web page creator that fits into the other iLife tools. Yet people want to compae it to RapidWeaver and even Dreamwewaver like it’s even trying to compete with either of those.
Your right. When Apple wants to compete they are serious about it. DVD Studio and Aperture are prime examples of that. Of course, no one wants to pay for such expensive software (and most of the time they don’t pay for it at all, but not to say they don’t own it