On January 10th, Steve Jobs of Apple announced at the Macworld Keynote a new program to become the 6th application in the iLife ’06 suite: iWeb

In the days before that, Karelia Software had been talking about and released their app Sandvox as a beta

I have not used iWeb, as I don’t have an interest in any of the other apps in iLife except for perhaps iMovie. But i have an old version of iMovie from when it was free, which fits my needs
However, I have tried out Sandvox a little, and today they sent an email that they’ve done a couple of updates (though not much), so I went to their site to check out the latest.
In the discussion forums, there is much talk about iWeb vs Sandvox – one of the links in there goes to the Ars Technica forum. Here they discuss iWeb, and it doesn’t sound good for Apple

Why? My initial suspicions have been proved true – the code looks Ghastly
Yes, it supports CSS, and is XHTML compliant, but (ignore the br tags at the top of each textarea – i haven’t quite figured out how to get rid of them):

To elaborate on the sort of HTML that iWeb generates, it pretty much violates the sort of semantic practices that the W3C advocates. It uses unordered and ordered lists where appropriate. But paragraphs are wrapped in…get this</p> <div class="paragraph Body"></div> <p>
and instead of using headers h1 through h6, it outputs something like this piece of crap:
</p> <div style="background: transparent;border: 1px #000000 none; float: none;margin: 0px; height: 49px; left: 35px;position: absolute; top: 22px; width: 630px;z-index: 1; " id="id5"> <div> <div> <div class="graphic_shape_layout_style_default"> <div class="paragraph Title" style="line-height: 42px; padding-bottom: 0pt; padding-top: 0pt; ">About Me</div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <p>

To make matters worse, text size is not resizable, and if you even think about using a font that isn’t particularly common, it will turn the text into a PNG file
And it doesn’t stop there, it requires the use of PNGs for the images to achieve the transparencies & reflection effects – but you try viewing it on the most common Browser/OS setup IE6/Windows and it will look nothing like the original design. They’re 24-bit PNGs, so the images are huge!
Next, since the code is pretty much unmanageable to be edited manually, if you want to make a small change to one page you have to use iWeb, which will then reupload the whole lot rather than just what you changed
Finally, it has been speculated that Google will not be able to index any page created in iWeb because of all the bloated code it generates at the top of every HTML file – particularly the div tags as ppmax says:

I built a site once and couldnt for the life of me figure out why google would crawl the site but not seem to index it. Turns out that the pages werent structured logically: I had a bunch of div’s on the page with no structure…. Google will crawl these pages–but by using div’s there’s no way to interepret the relevence or importance of the content contained therein. Which means that you wont get well ranked, if at all.
That’s bad web design

Here is an Example of a webpage made in iWeb – it isn’t too bad with the code, but it has plenty of div tags.
Here’s another – the about me page’s code is particularly ugly to look at

This all links back to Sandvox when Recasse posts:

I’ve been trying out Sandvox, and that software outputs very clean HTML. In fact, when it is officially released, I may start using it to manage some business websites I need to redesign. I’m very excited about it. In its beta state, it’s quite buggy and unstable. Hopefully the 1.0 release will have these kinks worked out.

Well that just about sums up the discussion thread there – I’m gonna have another look at Sandvox now that I’ve seen the results that iWeb generates and compare.
I suspect iWeb will be yet another reason why I won’t be buying iLife