Dear Final Debug: I’m a site designer and maintainer, so it’s time to ask the key question: Should I use Fusion or FrontPage?-Howard Seratt, Chicago.
Final Debug Responds: Howard, there are many programs that offer integrated page-and site-design capabilities. Just to mention two: The latest version of SoftQuad’s HoTMetaL Pro, one of the first commercial HTML editors, offers a reasonable information manager, and Allaire’s HomeSite offers a combination that long-time programmers in particular prefer. But for many companies that standardize on either Microsoft or IBM products, the choice is between NetObjects Fusion and Microsoft FrontPage.
Fusion is currently in its second version as a standalone program with a new application, Team Fusion, which offers networked capabilities, now in beta. Originally, Fusion was marketed to designers, which makes sense: the best-known of its developers is the well-known new-media designer Clement Mok. Rather than behave like an HTML editor, in which tags and the like are manipulated, Fusion presents a proprietary design environment, similar to PageMaker or Quark XPress, which can be translated into HTML. The site-management portion of the program resembles an outlining program; both the page- and site-management functions offer a plethora of customization and what-if features. FrontPage is available in several versions: the two we use most frequently at Silicon Prairie are the stripped-down FrontPage Express HTML editor that comes as a free add-on to Internet Explorer 4, and FrontPage 98, currently in beta. FrontPage 98 is more explicit than Fusion about the divison between page-management and site-management, splitting the program into two executable applications, FrontPage Editor for manipulating pages and FrontPage Explorer for manipulating sites.
So which should you use? Our best advice is: both. As a page-by-page HTML editor, FrontPage 98 is superior to Fusion’s HTML editor. It lets you switch easily between WYSIWYG and code-level displays. In Fusion, you need to use an external HTML editor to get this capability and sometimes the outside code gets a bit garbled in translation. Also, the tradeoff for Fusion’s extremely precise placement functions is larger page size, which means longer load time. As far as site management goes, Fusion is the clear leader. Its page-adding and -moving capabilities are easier and more flexible, and changes that need to be made to all pages in a site are much more easily accomplished.
Using FrontPage as a page editor and Fusion as a site manager does sometimes cause minor problems, especially if you try to edit the FrontPage-designed pages in Fusion. But we’ve used this pairing to build several sites now and it meets nearly all our needs.
This is just one solution. Do you use FrontPage or Fusion, together or apart? We want to know.
We have a contest winner!
This time, the prize is a shrink-wrapped copy of Microsoft Site Server, including Visual InterDev. Remember, Site Server works only on NT; we tried to install it on Windows 95 and … well, we don’t want to talk about it. You’ll need 64M bytes of RAM, too.
Here’s last week’s question:
In JavaScript, what does untaint(PIN) mean?
We used “PIN” as a random variable name; those three letters mean nothing. For a correct answer, we turn to the definitive Webmaster in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference, by Stephen Spainhour and Valerie Quercia (O’Reilly, 1996):
The untaint() function is used when the data-tainting security model is in effect. JavaScript automatically associates taint with data values that are potentially private, and which should not be “stolen” by scripts. If you need to allow these values to be exported by scripts, you must use untaint() to make untainted copies. untaint() does not remove from the taint the value it is passed; instead, it returns an untainted copy of that value, or an untainted reference to that value for object types. (Note that taint is associated with primitive values and with references to objects, not with the objects themselves.)
Sometimes taint is carried not by data values, but by the control flow of a program. In this case, you may need to remove taint from an entire window in which JavaScript code runs. You can do this by calling untaint() with no arguments. Note, however, that you can only do this if the window carries only the taint of the script that calls untaint(). If the window has been tainted by other scripts, it cannot be untainted.
Copyright (c) 1997 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
We received many correct or nearly correct answers. The first one was from from Aneek Roy, who wins Site Server. Next week we’ll have a new contest. The prize will be a copy of the text that helped us out this time, O’Reilly’s Webmaster in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference.
