Lets say that you just purchased HomeSite 3.0 and you want to create a Web page from scratch. You’ve
gone through the simple installation procedure--after installing Microsoft Internet Explorer for the
fourth time, you’re a pro at these "guided" installations, and HomeSite, unlike MSIE 4.0, did not crash
your system or hang during the installation procedure. After opening up HomeSite 3.0, you click on the
QuickTab tab and HomeSite’s Quick Start Wizard (See Figure 1) pops up to start you on your way.
Figure 1: HomeSite’s Quick Start Wizard
It is then simply a matter of filling in the appropriate blanks or selecting from drop down lists. Once
you’ve worked your way through the Quick Start Wizard (which includes things like keywords, description,
doc type, Title, etc), you end up with code that looks something like this:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN">
<html>
<head>
<title>WebDeveloper.com HomeSite 3.0 Review</title>
<meta http-equiv="keywords" content="WebDeveloper.com, HTML,
HomeSite 3.0, software reviews, WYSIWYN, Web development,
internet.com, internet, Internet development">
<meta http-equiv="description" content="This is a
WebDeveloper.com software review of Allaire's HomeSite 3.0. ">
</head>
<body bgcolor="White">
</body>
</html>
This is where the fun starts! Once you’ve got your basic Web page (which is what the above represents),
you can actually get in there and start adding the "meat" to the page. Where to start? Let’s say that I
wanted to add Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to the page. From the same QuickTab, click on the Style Sheet
Wizard button, and the Style Sheet Wizard pops up. By selecting parameters from drop down lists, which
include FONT, FONT WEIGHT, FONT COLOR, etc., the style sheet is created and saved to disk. You can then
include the CSS in your Web page. The actual style sheet is opened up in the editor for you to manually
edit if you wish.
Enough of the Wizards…what if we want to do some JavaScripting? Again, HomeSite 3.0 is ready for us.
By selecting the Script tab from the editor and clicking on the JavaScript Tree button, we are presented
with a drop down tree of JavaScript objects. These objects include:
Window
Navigator
Date
Math
String
Reserved Words
By clicking on the objects in the list, the JavaScript Tree expands, revealing each of the categories’
objects, such as window.history, window.location, window.document, etc. By double-clicking on these
objects within the tree, the code is inserted at the cursor point within the document which is being
edited. Of course, at any point in the game you may directly work within the source code editor
(See Figure 2).
Figure 2: The HomeSite Editor
As I’ve worked with many such tools, I’ve come to realize that a lot of tools will enable you to work
with JavaScript, or Active Server Pages, but usually not both. This is just not the case with HomeSite
3.0; it features an ASP tab with buttons which present drop down lists of variables and other aspects of
ASP pages. And of course Allaire’s included buttons for integrating its own Cold Fusion Markup Language
within your Web pages. Although they have a specific product for creating Cold Fusion applications
(Cold Fusion Studio), HomeSite 3.0 includes these tools so you won’t have to leave HomeSite when you’re
creating Cold Fusion-enabled pages.
