Tables from Hell
Written: Jun 22 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Stacked-page feature would be good if it really worked
Cons: Absolutely horrendous and illogical code it creates
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| dtobias's Full Review: Website Pros Fusion 4.0 Full Version Academic Lice... |
I admit from the start that I dislike WYSIWYG editors. I've always created my HTML by hand in text editors, and don't ever plan on stopping that.
However, Net Objects Fusion goes way beyond the call of duty to produce code that is massively worse than any other WYSIWYG editor I have ever seen.
It does this by doing all page layout in what I call "Tables From Hell". These are really convoluted nested tables with an enormous number of rows and columns, all of them hardcoded with pixel sizes, and many of them filled with clear-pixel graphics to hold their size.
This is done to let the user lay out the page in a pixel-perfect way, but HTML was never intended to have that degree of precise control, so the only way NOF can do it is by convoluting the code to a degenerate level.
Often, the user didn't even really want or need such precise control; quite frequently, he just wanted to center something, so he dragged it roughly into the middle of the page, causing NOF to generate code-from-hell to put it precisely 452 pixels to the right of the left margin, where the user happened to drag it. Never mind that the user really just wanted to center it, and that precise pixel position is actually a little bit off-center and looks worse than it would have if placed using a simple, clean <CENTER> tag.
There seems to be no way to get clean, logical HTML pages out of NOF, no matter how hard you try (unlike some other WYSIWYG editors, like DreamWeaver, that at least give you a chance of doing so if you're careful). And if you want your pages to avoid hardcoded pixel widths so they can resize gracefully to all screen sizes, you're out of luck because the whole design model of NOF is geared around the fixed-size grid.
There are many other flaws. Even one of the few good features of the program, the ability to generate a whole set of what it calls "stacked pages" out of a database (very useful when creating e-commerce sites starting with a product catalog in a database or spreadsheet), is severely flawed in that it offers no means of getting it to put reasonable <TITLE> elements in each of the pages (e.g., using the product name from the database). Instead, they get silly generic names like "Untitled Stacked Page", which is terrible for search engine listings.
Stay away from this program; learn how to code HTML yourself, or at least use a better editor like DreamWeaver.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
dtobias
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Member: Daniel Tobias
Location: Boca Raton, FL
Reviews written: 167
Trusted by: 96 members
About Me:
A programmer and Internet developer who's been a "computer geek" for over 20 years now.
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