Wednesday, May 17, 2006

iWeb 1.1 - now multiple web sites

I recently blogged on iWebSites 1.1, a utility that hacks iWeb to handle multiple sites.

Today TUAW noted iWeb 1.1 has covertly added multi-site support, as well as some other features. I definitely have to play with iWeb.

Update 5/17/06: I did a quick test. iWeb does have decent support for creating links to existing pages and related files. It does not support anchors. You can't highlight text and make it a target for a link, then create a link to it.

This is a shame, but I guess links are "out of scope" for what's very much a novice-friendly product. Alas, it's no "FrontPage 98", but then nothing is any more. Dreamweaver et al are in a different product niche, FrontPage died after 98 and the residual zombie was recently (mercifully) terminated by Microsoft, and several open source FP replacements have failed my tests so far. I've looked at the various Mac web publishing alternatives to iWeb and they weren't much better than iWeb 1.1, so I'm not enthused about them. I think most of the interesting work will be in Ajax web page authoring systems; alas the vendors of those (ex. Google) have "lock-in" front and center in their business plans. No moving web sites around!

No comments: