Customer Reviews

Visual Page 2.0

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I have used Visual Page (since 1998) and Front Page and Adobe GoLive and Drumbeat 2000 eCommerce ASP edition for creating websites. I DO like Visual Page for one basic reason. It is quick, it is easy, and it is the simplest of all those tools to learn. It is a good quality wysiwyg editor. It It fantastic at handling Tables. It handles CSS1 (sytles) very well, but it is not good with CSS2 (positioning). For positioning use FrontPage or Adobe. I have had to bring several people at work up to speed with HTML and I always use Visual Page as the teaching tool. It's drawbacks are that it does not have "Publish to a web" functionality like FrontPage. It does not have all the FrontPage server extensions to handle dynamic web pages. It does not do ASP and database access. It can manage a site as a project, but this feature is not very trustworthy in my opinion. FrontPage is better at this. I love it for it's low learning curve and it's very nice way of allowing me to use VP to create the CSS stylesheet code in the head of the document and them i simply type class="classname" inside of the tag I want it to be applied to. I rate it pretty high for it's low price, ease of use, stability, CSS functionality, and good clean html markup code. Everybody at work is able to pick it up quickly and run with it.

Of all the HTML 3.0 compatable WYSIWYG web page creators, this is the best for professional applications. The code it produces is clean and requires a minimum of tweaking and parsing before it can be considered production-quality.

It doesn't handle 4.0 HTML, CSS(P) or DHTML very well, but works great for RAD (rapid application development) and boss-over-shoulder development.

I still strongly recommend it.

Visual Page has been around for quite some time. This means it is an older HTML program not meant for HTML v4.0 or later. Nor was it being developed when CSS2 came along. Some of the ways of doing HTML have changed dramatically over the past ten years but it is the fault of Symantec for not keeping this excellent piece of software around and updated - not Visual Page itself. For it's time - it was one of the best pieces of software out there. Dreamweaver has far exceeded the capabilities of Visual Page - but then that is Dreamweaver. Adobe's GoLive also has far exceeded what Visual Page can do. Again - that is GoLive. Both pieces of software are still being updated and recreated every few years. Support and updates for Visual Page have not been in the works for a number of years now. So you can't judge (as some have) Visual Page's capabilities by today's software. Instead, you have to judge it simply by what it can do based upon when it was in active development. Would I use it today? I still do. Can I put PHP code into it? Yes, I can. Perl? Yes. Javascript? Yes. Java? Yes. The difference is that if you don't mind seeing the PHP code on your mark-up page you use the "<?PHP" tag and if you do mind seeing it you use the older "<script language='PHP'>" tag. Also, Visual Page is flexible enough to, if you display the web page in an external browser, correctly display the CSS2 stuff (positioning et al). It is just that Visual Page ITSELF - will not display with the CSS2 code because, again, development of Visual Page stopped before CSS2 ever came out. However, you can have Visual Page (as I've said) display the web page in FireFox or IE and it will show up correctly there. Also, if you place your development area under your web server (like in a test area) then you can also direct your web browser to go through the normal channels and it will also display correctly. So here is my final say in this matter:

1. Visual Page will do HTML v3.0 correctly. It will also do CSS1 correctly. It will display everything correctly also.
2. HTML v4.0 will 95%-99% show correctly. CSS2 is only about 75%. Any of the new commands which are in CSS2 (or later) can be entered - but will not do anything IN Visual Page. They will show up correctly if you set everything up on your web server and then reference the web pages just like your customers would.
3. My set-up is that when I am going to write some software I always make a new folder under the web server's top level folder (c:/Apache in this case), I modify the httpd.conf file to accomodate the new folder, and then all web pages, PHP scripts, Javascripts, etc... are put into that folder. (So: c:/Apache/myFolder/index.htm, or c:/Apache/myFolder/myScript.php, etc...). Then I tell Visual Page to view the web page in the external browser once to bring it up, change the location to "http://localhost/myFolder/index.htm" and go on off down the highway doing my thing.

A word about tables: I have used MANY visual aids in making web pages and Visual Page is the ONLY program that doesn't make me pull my hair out when creating tables. (I've only used Dreamweaver on the Mac and it was an old copy - like version 4.0. So the newer versions are probably a lot better.) The only thing about tables in Visual Page that I do not like is that you can not get rid of the "BORDER=" HTML part. I like to use the 'style="border:1px solid <color>;"' CSS entry but Visual Page insists on putting in the "BORDER=" item. I can live with it though. All I do is to delete it when I am through with all other edits and then the CSS style sheet takes over. The only other program I've liked a lot is DHE. From a guy in Italy. It too is simple, easy to use, and leaves your code alone when and where you put it in to the HTML.

Visual Page is good for just getting a site up and running. Nothing else. I've had to hold up on my plans for learning DHTML and ASP because of this. Visual Page won't support them. The source code editing is way outdated and attempts to do the breaks for you. Numerous bugs, including presentation of transparent GIFs, make it annoying. I would hesitate to recommend this product unless you are in an economic fix and it already came with another Symantec product.

I can only recommend this software to absolute beginners with very little or no knowledge of Web publishing. To its credit, Visual Page does offer have excellent "tour" files and novices should be able to make their own Web pages after the first day. But other users will be sorely disappointed. It is simply not sophisticated enough for many and does not support enough features. I also frequently have a problem with text and graphics being misaligned once published.

If you are just learning or need a Web site in a hurry, Visual Page has a lot to offer. But once you're beyond the beginning stage, there are far better Web publishing programs out there.