Adobe GoLive

GoLive began as its own very successful development company, creating what was at first a Macintosh-only Web editor called GoLive CyberStudio, which surpassed everything else of its time in terms of graphical editing. One of the first editors to make Web authoring more object-oriented and less code-focused, GoLive still works by enabling you to "drag in" any number of different objects and work with them without too much low-end knowledge of HTML coding. Since its early beginnings, it has gone cross-platform and hit the big time. It's now owned by graphics powerhouse Adobe, which has given it a makeover to resemble Adobe's line of graphics applications, while retaining its powerful approach.

For knowledgeable Web authors, GoLive offers a way to quickly prototype pages and then dig into the code to make them perfect. GoLive also supports tons of advanced features, including a JavaScript editor, drag-and-drop support for multimedia controls, and the ability to work easily with technologies such as CSS Positioning. It's definitely a pro-level tool, which extends to the price—currently, it's $299 for most users. Still, if you're planning to do professional work with GoLive, it's probably money worth spending.

Where to Get It

You can get Adobe GoLive in most computer stores and superstores, or you can order it online via any number of vendors. If you're not yet sure that GoLive is right for you, Adobe offers a 30-day demo that you can download at http://www.adobe.com/products/golive/main.html. Be warned that the demo's archive is over 35MB for the Windows version and nearly 50MB for the Mac version, so downloading it is only recommended if you have a broadband connection.

GoLive's Strengths

If you fire up GoLive and you have existing Web sites, you might come across the first advantage immediately—GoLive can import an existing Web site quickly and easily. All you have to do is tell it where the index page is, and it can figure out the rest. Once you've imported your site, GoLive allows you to manage that site visually (see Figure 3).

Figure 3 Adobe GoLive enables you to manage your Web site visually.

Probably the most obvious reason to choose GoLive is its integration with other Adobe tools. GoLive can work directly with PhotoShop image files, rollover animations created with Adobe ImageReady, and files created in Adobe Illustrator or Adobe LiveMotion. This integration, as well as a shared approach to the user interface, makes Adobe GoLive a good choice for Web authors who have bought other Adobe products, or Adobe users looking for a pro-level Web development tool. In fact, you can purchase GoLive in various bundles with these other Adobe tools (one of them called Adobe Web Studio), which is much cheaper than buying each application individually.

GoLive offers many additional rich features, including strong support for programming back-end databases, the ability to create pages that work with Microsoft's ASP servers, and automatic conversion of HTML documents to XHTML. It offers particularly strong tools for editing the source code, including the ability to view elements in different ways, such as a hierarchical tree that can show you when elements are missing from the logic of your page. And GoLive includes a special feature to ensure that code you import or type directly will remain off-limits to the program so that it doesn't change items you've hand-coded.

In fact, if you happen to have GoLive or the GoLive demo available as you work through this book or explore XHTML coding further, you'll find the Source mode is a great way to work in XHTML. (You access Source mode by clicking the Source tab at the top of the editing window.) Small buttons in the button bar enable you to highlight different portions of the code—you can highlight only links, for instance, or only server-side code. You can also display line numbers. This can be handy for troubleshooting JavaScript (JScript) code in Internet Explorer, which reports errors on numbered lines. GoLive even displays a small error count at the top of the editing window, and it can alert you to errors and warn about problematic code.

Although GoLive is a strong Windows tool, its Mac roots still show through a bit. It supports AppleScript, it can work extensively with QuickTime movies, and it directly supports WebObjects technology, which is Apple's high-end Web application environment (for building high-capacity Web stores, for instance) .

GoLive's Weaknesses

Reviewers and users often directly compare Adobe GoLive to Macromedia Dreamweaver (covered later in this chapter), which tends to be the category leader. Whereas GoLive relies on its Adobe family integration for some of its strengths, some feel that it continues to lag behind Dreamweaver's ease of use. GoLive requires a slightly steeper learning curve than some other editors, although it does go deeper with database-driven sites than much of the competition does.

GoLive 5 can have trouble with standards, thanks to some slightly proprietary approaches to creating pages. It doesn't always create pages that pass muster with the validators, it doesn't generate strict XHTML 1.0, and often it throws in some messy proprietary codes (such as special attributes for tables), particularly when you're working with tables and grid-based layouts.

If you plan to use GoLive, you should have a large computer display and it should run at high resolution. GoLive uses palettes for a number of solutions and tools, making it easy to fill up the screen on smaller displays. Editing Web pages at 800x600 is frustrating at best (see Figure 4). A better workspace for GoLive includes a large display and a good mouse—you'll be doing a lot of pointing and clicking, and contextual menus abound.

Figure 4 These are GoLive's default palette positions—nearly impossible to work with at 800x600.

GoLive's Highlights

If you've already put together a Web site of any sort, you should allow GoLive to import that site so you can see the site-management tools. Once you grow familiar with GoLive, you'll appreciate being able to not only edit pages within it, but to manage your overall site, including the FTP process to your server. In fact, if your server supports the WebDAV protocol, you can actually edit your pages directly on the server using GoLive, which supports WebDAV.

If the site is stored on your local hard disk, import it by choosing File, New Site, Import from Folder. If not, choose File, New Site, Import to import from an FTP Server. In the second case, your entire site will be downloaded via FTP, which can take a while.

Once the site is imported, you'll see the Site window. There you can inspect all the pages on the site, along with other attributes of the site's markup. For instance, you can check the Colors tab to see the different colors being used in your site. GoLive even allows you to assign your own names to particular color values, which can be handy if you have a group of designers and you want to create a custom palette of approved colors. Clicking the Font Sets tab shows you the different font families being used—again, this is helpful if you have a team of designers for your site. The Errors tab shows any URLs or other referenced files that don't exist or links that don't work.

Double-click a page in the Site window (or create a new one using the File, New command), and you're introduced to the main editing interface. Along the top of the editing window are a number of tabs that you use to change modes—Layout, Source, Preview, and others for viewing frames and viewing an element hierarchy.

Once you're working on a page in Layout mode, you'll find that most of the images, form elements, and pretty much anything else you don't type in are added by dragging an icon to your page. The Objects palette holds different icons that you can drag directly to your window. Anything from a comment, a line break, or a horizontal line, all the way up to a QuickTime or RealMedia plug-in object, can be dragged directly into the editing window. Once an element is in the window, selecting it causes its properties to be displayed in the Inspector, which you can then use to tweak the attribute settings for that element.

Perhaps the least familiar element to a seasoned XHTML author is the layout grid that GoLive can use for HTML layout (see Figure 5). Essentially, it enables you to lay out your page as precisely as you'd like without worrying about any particular CSS, table, or other element or property. Then, when you're done, HTML tables are created to place the elements on the page as exactly as is possible with the HTML specification.

Figure 5 You can use a layout grid to position elements without worrying about the underlying table code.