Even if you’re not a coder type, GoLive 6 offers a handful of thoughtful features to coerce your page’s code into a pristine and compatible form. GoLive’s syntax checker gets a shot in the arm, now highlighting the trouble spots in your document and informing you of the problems at hand based upon the selected DTDs (Document Type Definitions, specifications that accompany a document and identify its markup language and how it should be processed) or browser profile (see figure 8). Quickly insert tags while in Layout mode using the new Visual Tag editor that provides an assortment of tags and tag attributes. GoLive even promises accessibility tools to check if your site is compliant with Section 508, a law passed by the government requiring the Web pages of government agencies, elected officials, and military organizations must be rendered accessible to people with disabilities.
Figure 8: The improved Syntax Checker now supports just about every DTD and browser profile imaginable.
Publish or Perish
Being a Web authoring application can’t be an easy job. With technologies and web languages constantly emerging and evolving, it’s up to your authoring application to keep up with it all, even if you can’t. GoLive 6 makes a noble attempt to do just this with full support of the standard wireless languages: WAP, i-Mode (CHTML), XHTML-Basic. It also includes phone emulators to preview your wireless authoring work directly within GoLive. Unfortunately, this wireless preview capability is Windows only.
The completely reworked Dynamic Content tools present full support for ASP, JSP and PHP server-scripting technologies via drag-and-drop objects. A Dynamic Content wizard helps you along to ensure your setup is correct and includes a free app server if you don’t already have one. Although this may be lost on many GoLive users, anyone considering the pricey Macromedia UltraDev may want to think twice. The Dynamic Content tools are easily on par with, if not better than, UltraDev and they’re included free. GoLive 6 XML support allows you to repurpose content from InDesign 2 documents for the Web and it’s still the only Web authoring application to include a built-in QuickTime and SMIL editor with SWF track support.
Figure 9: The Dynamic Content palette includes its own set of drag-and-drop objects.
Longtime GoLive users should welcome the latest version. Not only will it bring the application up-to-date with the latest Web languages and technologies, it will have bragging rights to be the first professional authoring application to support OS X and Windows XP. I’m looking forward to using the updated site diagramming tools as well as the improved table editing and syntax checker. The included Web Workgroup Server might just be the solution many teams have been searching for. It appears as though GoLive users may find a truly modern application that makes developing for the Web as easy as it can get these days.
This article was last modified on January 8, 2023
This article was first published on February 19, 2002
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