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

While everyone eagerly awaits what his Steveness (aka Steve Jobs) is going to announce at the keynote tomorrow, rumours have been circulating about one of the items
This item has encroached on the territory of another developer Karelia Software and their new product, Sandvox:

The app requires OS X 10.4 Tiger, and is a Web Site Creation app which makes it very easy to make good looking well coded sites

…Sandvox makes Web site creation elegant, intuitive and fun. It’s the Macintosh way — the way it should be: drag and drop content, watch your site take shape as you create it, and publish. Sandvox makes it easy to keep in touch via the Web with friends, family and customers. …

Now, here’s the part I’m trying to get to – please click the download link and download a copy – because the more people that download from this link, the more I get to save when it comes out on full release, as this is still a beta version. And from that you too can save money by recommending the software to others

This is all so that when Apple release their program tomorrow, lots mac users can then have tried Sandvox aswell. We will have to wait and see which will be preferred, but we have to give the little guys a fair shot

I finally got round to going into my local Apple Store in London’s Regent Street
Expecting it to be amazing I came out with mixed emotions
Of course I couldn’t walk out of there without buying something, so I bought a new keyboard to replace my existing replacement one. I broke the original USB one a couple of years ago after trashing it at uni – spilt too much beer on it and it got thrown around the room a little bit too much! Replaced it temporarily with my old ADB Apple Extended Keyboard II – arguably Apple’s best keyboard… except that it’s not USB, so I had to connect it with an ADB to USB adaptor

But back to the store… my initial impressions were: this is not a shop, it’s a showroom!
I felt like I needed to be wearing an iPod and talking about the latest airport extreme accessory to use it to listen to my music from two rooms away!
But my mac isn’t like that! I don’t own an iPod, and don’t have any intentions of owning one in the short term – am more likely to buy one of the competitor’s options
I also felt that this wasn’t a computer shop because there were assistants everywhere except whenever you wanted them – I had to fight to talk to someone to ask advice about upgrade options and then where I could find a keyboard that wasn’t a bluetooth one. Eventually one assistant offered to look to see if they had any in stock, and it was pretty good value @ £19 including VAT
On my way out I asked someone if they were going to be showing the Macworld keynote next week, to which the response was as if to say “what’s a keynote” based on the expression. This was followed by a more official “We don’t show Keynotes” – that was the icing on the cake – why not!?!

Back home, the keyboard seems good, though it crashed my mac a couple of times – teething troubles i guess with all my hardware, and i don’t like the left ctrl button or the slopes, but at least i can drop into open firmware, single user mode, the boot manager and zap the pram again. It’s also good to be able to type the “~” key again which seemed to disappear when I upgraded to 10.4 – dunno why, but now I’ve got it back! Oh, and the eject and opt-eject keys now open the correct DVD drives – on the old keyboard, they both opened the slave on the IDE bus.
The arrow keys seem a bit weird, I do miss the power key which is now the eject button, as now I have to use ctrl-eject to bring up the shutdown/sleep/logout dialogue box. Haven’t even tried the volume keys – they look a bit weird. Also, as many have commented, it’s a shame the F-keys don’t have spaces every 4 keys like the old keyboards. And again, the downward slope on the bottom row (command, ctrl, spacebar, etc) is very weird, and upward slope on the F-keys will take a bit of getting used to
I liked the nice touches in the packaging – the USB extension lead, and the covers for the plugs on the leads which I will be keeping for my other USB cables – very well done and that they give you a nice bag that you can carry on your shoulder

Also on my way out I picked up the event schedule which looks really good if I had the time to practically live in the apple store covering a different topic every hour. You can follow what’s going on using Apple’s Event Widget (requires dashboard ie OSX 10.4 Tiger or equivalent)
I’m waiting to find out when the really local Apple Store in Brent Cross, London will be opening – have walked past it several times, and would be really convenient. Having said that, I can’t not add how disappointed I was by the range of products and how overpriced everything felt. Nothing felt like it was a bargain (except for the keyboard! and that wasn’t even on the shelves). USB card readers for £30, DVD-Rs for £4 each, Firewire drives £70 for 40GB – none of it felt like something I wanted to buy, and more like something I might write down and go online to find somewhere cheaper.

Would I go back to the Regent Street shop again? Not unless I was in the area and had some time to kill – like I say, it felt more like a showroom than a shop
Accessories were stacked underneath showroom iPods, Scanners, and iMacs. Even Powermac G5s seemed to be pushed into the background to show off the consumer products
It’s a shame, but perhaps I had too high an expectation of it