I recently tested two different editors for easy website creation: Sandvox and Rapidweaver. Now I've also created a site with iWeb. Sandvox was out of the question due to its gigantic memory requirements, Rapidweaver already showed some nice and interesting features and was especially fast. But the styles were not as professional as those from Sandvox. How does iWeb perform?

Well, take a look at the site. Right away, I noticed a whole series of problem points:

  • The style in iWeb looks much "slicker" than in the rendered output. Font rendering is not really good on websites with every browser.
  • The idiotic redirection and rather unusual folder names. Sure, I can name my site differently - but why the hell should I rename my site just because iWeb makes a folder name out of it directly?
  • The URLs are anything but beautiful - and I generally find redirection on the start URL stupid, you can really proceed more intelligently and use the default document meaningfully. And take a look at the blog pages, see what URLs they get. Disgusting.
  • With Lynx, you can't use the whole thing at all. The redirects are wrong and the links are no longer displayed.
  • Even if the HTML code is validated, it is still not really semantic. Headings are not set as Hx, but simply made larger by styles.
  • Layouts are not made with tables, but DIVs are misused as tables through inline styles. Sorry, but just changing the tag does not make a layout beautiful.
  • The source code is completely unreadable and shit.
  • The basic pages constantly contain JavaScript for various purposes. And no, iWeb has definitely not informed about this in the editor. How can you expect Mac users to then also think about the problems of JavaScript-based elements later?
  • Why a company that programs its own text-to-speech software, builds its own spell-check solutions and otherwise handles text relatively well, makes the shortening of blog post texts in such a way that it is cut off in the middle of a word, only Apple knows.
  • Accessibility? We don't need no stinking Accessibility.

I hope Apple will improve this significantly. I mean, semantic layout and source code that complies with accessibility guidelines is really nothing new. Why Apple produces such lousy HTML code is a real mystery to me.