Monday, January 09, 2006

Sandvox and the return of end-user web site authoring

[Updated with review results.]

This is like watching the return of the dead. In the 90s there were many quite good end-user tools for web site creation. The only survivor of those glory days is FrontPage, and it's been horribly transmogrified into some zombie child of Microsoft Office.

Now, suddenly, this niche is coming back to life, at least in the OS X world. Karelia, a respected Mac software firm, has a beta of Sandvox. Ok, so it's probably not the document-oriented content-management-lite database-free static-output product with drag and drop link creation and dynamic link maintenance that I want, but any life in this domain is encouraging.

See also some prior posts of mine:
Content Management Systems
nVU and RapidWeaver: a lament (See also Tim's comments, though I think he missed my point about document-centric and end-user oriented).
Update 9/14: That was fast. My minimal requirements are the ability to select text and drag and drop it between pages. That should create a link and a bookmark. Moving pages in the development environment should update links (ie. indirection implemented). Creating links should allow one to select from available pages and bookmarks. Sandvox failed all these tests. Reviewing the forums it's pretty raw -- probably rushed out due to iWeb. I'll look at it again in six months.

It is pretty though.

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