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NEWS ANALYSIS

JULY 8, 1996 / VOLUME 10 NUMBER 26

Web editing is DTP of the '90s

WYSIWYG HTML promise unfulfilled

By Joanna Pearlstein (joanna_pearlstein@macweek.com)

A band of HTML editors has recently marched into the Mac market, and several more players are warming up to join the parade. But the new offerings don't impress professional Web page designers, who say the current WYSIWYG tools lack the flexibility necessary to create large Web sites.

Many professionals said they rely on BBEdit, a $119 text-based HTML editor from Bare Bones Software Inc. of Natick, Mass. Jason O'Grady, a partner at Odyssey Systems Corp. of Manayunk, Pa., designs pages exclusively in BBEdit. "It's fast, it's flexible. ... I hate all the extra crap that [Adobe] PageMill throws in," he said.

Amy Goodloe, principal designer at Women Online Designs of Oakland, Calif., said, "You don't have to know what you're doing in PageMill, and I think that's a problem -- you can more easily screw up that way."

Despite these comments, the software industry seems to be focusing [Image] on WYSIWYG editors as the only players in the market. Research by International Data Corp. of Framingham, Mass., showed PageMill and America Online Inc.'s GNNpress as the two most popular HTML editors last year. The study did not include text editors such as BBEdit.

Industry watchers have said the Web page editing market is in a position similar to that of desktop publishing applications 10 years ago. Yet many users said the current products do not offer the ease of use provided by desktop publishing programs of the 1980s.

Laxman Gani, online services director at the Austin (Texas) Chronicle, said he has not found an HTML editor that combines functionality and ease of use the way QuarkXPress and Adobe PageMaker do for desktop publishing.

Joan-Carol Brigham, senior staff consultant at IDC, said HTML and PageMill today are like Standard Generalized Markup Language and PageMaker were in 1985. "In 1985, PageMaker was cool, but it wasn't for professionals," Brigham said. "It's almost the exact analogy today. The professionals are saying, 'I don't need the user interface. I can do it a lot faster this way.' "

For many, the promise of graphical HTML editing remains unfulfilled partially because of the very nature of the markup language. "The problem with WYSIWYG HTML editing tools is that they are oxymorons," said Brian Behlendorf, chief technology officer at Organic Online, a professional Web design company in San Francisco. "HTML is a structural language, not a presentational language like PostScript, so what you see when you write it may very well not be what you see when you view it."

Analysts and users said that new WYSIWYG tools, such as PageMill and Claris Corp.'s Home Page, may find more success in lower-end markets, even though those products are targeted at a broad range of users. Several users, critical of the first release of PageMill, expressed optimism about Version 2.0, due this summer. Odyssey's O'Grady said he thought the upcoming HoTMetaL Pro 3.0 from SoftQuad Inc. sounded interesting, but, "we've tried others, and we always come back to BBEdit."

IDC's Brigham said that marketing or human resources employees who are creating internal Web sites are more likely to use WYSIWYG tools such as PageMill. She said the new WYSIWYG tools "will open up the market to the nonprofessional and the business user. I think the intranet and Internet will evolve to be different beasts, and the tools will be different."

One drawback of graphical HTML editors is the differences among the various Web browsers. "With BBEdit you can preview in whatever browser you use," O'Grady said. "PageMill has its own little browser, but if you view a page in Netscape [Navigator] or Microsoft Internet Explorer, it looks totally different."

Chris Stevens, analyst at the Aberdeen Group in Boston, said, "The problem with WYSIWYG is, WYSIWYG for what? Netscape [Navigator] or Mosaic? It changes so much by browser."

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