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
and instead of using headers h1 through h6, it outputs something like this piece of crap:
About Me
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
I dunno if you’re aware of this about Sandvox, stony?
At least, there is a workaround… 🙄
Comment doesn’t show so guess I’m under moderation… 😛
[edit] Stony says: You are indeed! j/k i think it’s either a glitch or because the URLs came through to me with rel=”nofollow” at the end of the a href tag which probably confused it [/edit]
That’s quite interesting – i hadn’t noticed it because i have Smart Crash Reporter installed anyway. Haven’t seen it in action yet though – my thinking was that it’s gotta help the developers and given that i have input managers like Saft which gets updated every time apple releases a new build then SCR isn’t really going to be that much of a burdon. I’ve got a bunch of other Input managers installed too:
SafariNoTimeout – stops safari timing out after 60 secs
Ecamm Download Comment – really useful plugin that puts the URL of where you downloaded a file from into the comments field of the get info box
Menu Extra Enabler – enables more 3rd party menu extras
However, it is very sneaky that sandvox installs it without asking permission. I’m guessing that since it’s still in beta, the authours have used it as a means for bug testing their app and possibly to highlight to apple some of the bugs in webkit that needed to be resolved.
I had a good look into the package contents to see if the input manager is in there but i couldnt find it. There’s all sorts of bits and pieces of frameworks in there so who knows where they might have put it. But it appears that they must have embedded it in the code for the main app.
That workaround is definitely overkill like using a sledgehammer to crack a peanut, but if it makes you feel happier and it appears to work.
Looking back at Smart Crash Reporter, it doesn’t look like there are too many apps that utilise it and i don’t think i use any of them on a regular basis other than the unsanity products which is right at the bottom.
The jury is still out, and i suspect that if anyone’s fed this back to the Karelia Soft people, they’ll more than likely add a dialogue box to the next beta asking permission. At least that’s what i hope
Yeah their reply in that article says just that, next version a pop-up will ask if it’s ok to install Crash Reporter. The developers were falling all over out of embarrassment when this broke out. I can understand their need to know how to improve their app but man they should let us know what exactly they install on our computers if there is anything other than their app that we naively installed. They think they were in their right to do so. Sony had the same opinion when they released their evil DRM/rootkit music CDs. The result isn’t the same, mind you, but it’s the idea that these people think they are in their right to do so and not warn unsuspecting honest people.
I’m pushing the example to its extreme but… you know what I mean? 😕