Last Updated: August 7, 2004
There's more to HomeSite 5 than you might think. While at first glance it doesn't seem too different from HomeSite 4.5, there are some really useful improvements.
Auto-Save
If you have ever spent several hours working on a page only to have your computer crash and you lose everything you wrote? Yes, I know, you should save regularly, but if you're anything like me, you get involved in the coding, and you forget. Thankfully, Homesite 5 now includes auto-save. Within three days of using the product I had to use the auto-save. I had ten files open when my computer did the "blue screen of death". When I reopened Homesite after restarting, all ten files were available and almost nothing missing.
Other Useful New Features
- XHTML support- Homesite now will write XHTML based on the W3C specification for XHTML 1.0
- Edit related files- Now if you reference a file in your HTML, you can right-click on it and edit it in Homesite as well.
- Deploy by folder- In previous versions, you could set up projects to deploy to specific Web sites, but now you can set up folders to deploy in different locations and methods.
- Collapsible code- When you write large Web pages, it can be convenient to be able to collapse certain sections to make the rest of the page more readable.
- Integration with Fireworks- This will allow you to improve your workflow by creating your graphics and layouts in Fireworks and bring them directly into Homesite -
- Double-byte support- Now Homesite supports international characters, allowing developers to write pages in these languages, like Japanese and Korean.
Homesite 5 offers all the flexibility and power of a text HTML editor, with great tools to help beginners learn HTML as well. Things like tag help and tag editors allow you to edit tags visually. There are also built-in tools to validate the HTML both as you write it and after the page is complete. There are validation tools available for HTML, XHTML, SMIL, and WML.
