On Sat, Aug 27, 2011 at 6:12 AM, Timothy Miller <[email protected]> wrote: > My website is a bit too complex for a self-serve website builder. I > understand drag and drop web-building apps tend to make really messy code.
That's not necessarily true and many (most?) professional website designers do use tools like Dreamweaver (or whatever Adobe is calling that these days). It is IMO only an elite group of web designers who produce their pages programmatically. Between people producing designs in Photoshop (or hacking pre-designed templates) and people who hand-code in Notepad, lies a whole sea of people who use html-specific design tools. AFAIR Tim Berners-Lee never expected people to actually hand-code HTML (and that was before the introduction of 5 major browsers, javascript and CSS). However, in my experience the "professional" tools are so cumbersome and have such a steep learning curve that one might as well just learn CSS and HTML (and choose some particular javascript toolkit/widgets that suit your need). If you don't want to go that route, then of all the different drag and drop tools for building websites, the one that I found easiest to pickup is the (venerable) NetObjects Fusion. There is a free version to be found here: http://netobjects.com/html/essentials.html Since it sounds like you already have worked out your design, navigation and interactions then maybe it will be easiest to translate that in NOF. Despite the (relative) simplicity of the tool, it does have the ability to act as a full-blown CSS editor, should you eventually find yourself going in that direction (although it's not necesary to use CSS to start with). Have a glance at the PDFs on that page, and see if NOF is something that might suit you (it's probably easier to ascertain how it works by glancing through the docs than just firing it up). I haven't looked at the Essentials version (it's something they released in the last couple of years), but I seriously doubt that you would need more than that (there are still current users of NOF who haven't upgraded in a decade). Beyond the basics of HTML/CSS generation, I do not rate any of the add-ons for NOF (e.g. the templates, Flash calendaring, javascript gimmicks etc.) There are a plethora of great tools (flash, javascript) to supplement any website, and such third-party tools can be incorporated into a website generated from NOF with a little effort. NOF did come with a SDK way back when, but that has been allowed to languish. With that SDK one could actually add features to the NOF IDE to provide additional functionality or to programmatically manipulate objects or to alter the generation of the HTML. NOF is Windows only. Like Hypercard, it seems like some people had the right idea a long time back (I think originally NOF was Mac-only), but that idea never caught on. Whilst LiveCode has gone from strength to strength, NOF is an example of a tool that has barely improved between version 8 (from about a decade ago) and version 12. I hope that is of some help. Bernard _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list [email protected] Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
