Part 1 - Source Mode vs Layout Mode Next

What the Rating Icons Mean
Love It!	Indifferent or Won't Use it	Hate It!

System Requirements
  Pentium III or higher
  128MB of RAM
  90MB of disk space
  Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP (not NT)
  CD-ROM
  SVGA display
  workgroup features require 150MB and Windows 2K or XP

I have been using Adobe's products for several years, and was interested in checking out GoLive, their offering in the web design realm. I have been a hand-coder since my first days of web design, and learned HTML with Windows' Notepad, and have shied away from WSYWIG tools in the past because of how terribly they butchered my code.

Using the Source Mode
So, being a die-hard hand-coder, I was pleased to see that I could program in the Source Mode and still have several shortcuts available.

There are a few enhancements over version 5 that I really appreciate. Being able to double-click on the items in the Objects Palette instead of click-drag is a time-saver. And being able to highlight some text and hit CTRL-I (for italics) or CTRL-B (for bold) instead of highlighting and having to bring the mouse up to the menu and click on I or B is also a time-saver I take advantage of.

GoLive 6.0's syntax checker is right up there with some of the best development environments I have worked with. The color coding of tags is especially helpful in discovering typos right away.

There is the option of working in Layout Mode with the Source Code Window open so you can see the code that is being generated by any dragging and dropping of objects. This lets coders like me see what is happening to my code, and it could be an easy way for the non-coder to learn HTML.

Yet another option for getting a taste of working with the code is to use the new Visual Tag Editor to manually insert tags while in the Layout Mode. (In Layout mode, select Special from the menu bar at the top of the window, then Visual Tag Editor.) While dragging and dropping as usual, you can select from a number of HTML tags and associated parameters.

But I wish more of the conveniences of the Layout Mode were available in Source Mode. The convenience of the Inspector is sorely missed. The ability to select an image or link using a browse function, or fine-tune your table configurations via a GUI interface would be my vote for an enhancement. Since this is not available in Source Mode, I will go into Layout Mode to select my image URLs (but like I said earlier, I will save the file first...)

Unfortunately, I have given up on working simultaneously in both Source Mode (for ease of tweaking code) and Layout Mode (for the abundant shortcuts available), because going into the Layout Mode did some weird indenting to my code. It wouldn't be so bad if the wierd indenting occurred only at the section of code where I changed something in Layout Mode, I could easily fix that later. But if you change something while in Layout Mode, the entire file is re-indented. I tried a few things (like selecting Word Wrap, and un-checking the "Auto Indent" in the preferences), but could not find the right combination so that my code was not indented weirdly. So, when I do want to use a shortcut available only in Layout Mode, I will first save my file, go into Layout Mode and do the function I want, go back into Source Mode and copy and save the piece of code just created, close the file without saving, re-open and paste in the new code. Pretty convoluted, but it works for me.

Also, I had to go searching the Preferences to turn off "make new links absolute" option. This came turned on by default, and any link I added with the Inspector had a path like "file:///G:/ASMP/reviews/images/glfig1.jpg". And I wish there were multiple undo's available like in Photoshop (or Word for that matter).

This is probably a Windows thing, but I hate when I try to access a file on a removeable media that is no longer in the drive (I store a lot of my ongoing projects on ZIP disks, so they can travel with me), GoLive hangs up, and I have to use the Windows End Task function to start over, losing whatever I am working on and neglected to save. (Example: Sometimes I am working on something similar to a previous project, and I would like to copy/paste the code from the other project instead of re-inventing the code.)

More of this Review
	[Part 1 - Source vs Layout]
Next	[Part 2 - Palettes, Rollovers, Actions, Smart Objects, CSS, ASCII Characters]
	[Part 3 - Dynamic Content, Templates, Wireless Support, Layout Grids & Tables, Multimedia]
	[Part 4 - Workflow and Team Involvement, Search And Replace, Spell Checking, Final Words]