More iWeb Blogging

Per some comments on my last iWeb blog entry, I posted a couple more entries each showing the results of different things. One entry shows that not all text is rendered as an image in iWeb. If the font is a web-friendly font like Arial, it renders as ordinary styled text. If you use an odd-ball font, then it becomes an image. I think that makes sense. Again, the resulting HTML is ugly. And you purists can whine all you want. You'd never use a WYSIWYG HTML editor anyways, so quit griping. To me, I think the fact that I get a page that looks the same on multiple browsers is quite a feat.

There are those out there who hate divs, and preach that they should use paragraph tags. Maybe... Paragraph tags add spaces where they may not be wanted. A div gives you a content area that does not have any baggage as far as rendering goes. It simply gives you a rectangle within to put content. Maybe they are overdone... so are tables in many other sites. Tables were never meant for formatting, and yet they are used time and again to accomplish just that. I'm just trying to show that iWeb can be used by folks and can get some nice results. It's true you don't have complete control, but that is not the intended audience.

All of that aside, iWeb does have a few things other than the resulting HTML that could be improved for normal Joe and Sally users. For one, there is no easy way to republish only the things that change, at least not if you are publishing to a folder. This would be a big help. It doesn't have an easy way to add comments to blogs. Notice, I didn't say it was impossible. It can be done, as you can see from my blog, but it requires you to modify the resulting HTML, adding some script code. The templates are in XML, so it should be possible to add this script automatically. I am working on this for myself, and if I figure it out, instructions will be posted for everyone.

That's it for now. Check out the two new posts, and the resulting source so you can see some cases where it renders text as images, and some cases where text is rendered as text. Comment on them all you like. I am doing this as a way for some new ideas to be brought out. If anyone would like to help me in my endeavour to add commenting to the iWeb Templates, e-mail me.