The sad state of web site authoring on OS X -- and XP

I recently came across a set of enthusiastic announcments about RapidWeaver. I tried it in demo mode.

Simple, yes. Useful? Minimally. By comparison to FrontPage 98 it's a toy. (FrontPage after 1998 went into a downwards death spiral comparable to the post 1997 collapse of Microsoft Word.)

So then I tried NVU, an open source Java app. It's a partial clone of FrontPage 2000 (shame they didn't clone FP 98!!). It's far beyond RapidWeaver, but one of the first things I did was create an anchor on a page, then create a link on the same page to that anchor. The HTML was well formed, but the GUI didn't create a viewable link. Ooookaaay, so much for NVU.

Well, there's always the ghost of Mozilla composer, though it's very much a page rather than site oriented application. Then there's Dreamweaver, with its increasingly feeble OS X support. I suppose there a bunch of other page oriented solutions.

Here's Faughnan's test for a serious web authoring tool. I don't think any OS X app can pass this test today -- FrontPage 98 did it well:

• View a web site as a file hierarchy or a directed graph of links.
• Click on page icon see metadata, drag and drop into a page to create a link with text taken from target page title.
• Create an anchor on a page. Drag and drop to create a link to anchor. Drag anchor to another page to create a link.
• Change the physical location or file name of a page. Have all links in web site update to reflect this change.

If a document-oriented end-user tool can't do this, it's not a serious contender. In 1997 (almost 9 years ago) we had at least four applications that were contenders, of which FrontPage/Vermeer was only one (AOL had another, I forget the rest). Now we have a range of OS X solutions that look like this:

• Blogger with TextArea support for Firefox/IE (but not Safari)
• Slightly more sophisticated blogger solutions
• Various page oriented solutions (wordprocessor save as HTML)
  
• Toy site management tools like RapidWeaver
• The missing domain once inhabited by FrontPage
• The missing domain once inhabited by Dreamweaver
  
• Industrial content management solutions that aren't particularly author-friendly and cost thousands of dollars.
  

The XP situation is only slightly better (if you consider Dreamweaver to be a non-industrial solution). Alas, the bottom line is that there just isn't a large enough market like me! I do need to migrate off of FrontPage on my XP machine. Perhaps my best option is to see how active NVU development is, and do some QA for them.