NetObjectsFusion (NOF) is a web design tool, from 1996 to 2001 developed and distributed by NetObjects, Inc., marketed from 2001 until 2009 by Web.com (formerly dubbed Website Pros), which bought the application in 2001, and from July 2009 on distributed again by the re-established NetObjects, Inc.
The origins of NetObjects Fusion date back to the 1980s. At Apple Computer, Samir Arora, David Kleinberg, and Sal Arora conducted research on early information navigation applications before the term "browser" was coined and before the invention of Mosaic.
Development was transferred to the new-founded company Rae Technology, a spin-off from Apple Computer. At Rae, the two Arora brothers and David Kleinberg developed an object-oriented environment called SOLO (Structure of Linked Objects),[2][3] which is the technological basis of NetObjects Fusion.
NetObjects, Inc. was founded in 1995 with an initial investment by Rae Technology[2] to complete the development of NetObjects Fusion.
Reputation and market share
Clement Mok, Victor Zaud, Karen Rall, and Susan Kare, interactivity designers, were contracted to accomplish the development of NetObjects Fusion and design its interface.
The hopes of the newly founded company were high,[4] and the reactions of the market and IT observers to the first two releases of NetObjects Fusion in 1996 and 1997 were very positive. Among other awards NetObjects Fusion received were InfoWorld's Analyst Choice Award and PC Magazine's Editors' Choice.
After a few years of great success, NOF fell back in market share and reputation against the competition, mainly Dreamweaver, though it always kept a dedicated user community. In the last few years, sales showed a slight downward tendency, staying flat in 2008 with a revenue of $2.5 million.[5] Revenue from software sales was $2.44 million in 2007 (no new version of NetObjects Fusion was released), down from $3.58 million in 2006 and $3.86 million in 2005.[6][7][8]
NetObjects Fusion reached the biggest resonance in Germany, reaching nearly two-thirds of the market by the end of the 1990s.[9] English and German are the only languages in which NOF is currently distributed.
The software was targeted at users who have a traditional print design, authoring or journalistic background. The developers of NetObjects Fusion intended to give them a user interface and a workflow they are used to.[10]
After the first use of a pre-release version in 1996, photojournalistRick Smolan said: "NetObjects was the only tool that would enable a team of the world's top picture editors and writers to become instant Web page designers. It let them do what they do best—edit and write—and automatically generated finished, sophisticated Web pages that millions of people were able to see only minutes after they were designed."[4]
The NetObjects-specific graphical interface proved to be a barrier for programmers who wanted full access to HTML. An external editor was needed to change the HTML that NetObjects Fusion generated. Manually changed HTML code cannot be imported back into NetObjects Fusion.
With later versions, more and more so-called "insertion points" have been implemented where pieces of HTML can be inserted into the NOF-generated code (like between HEAD tags or inside BODY tags). Release 11 comes with HTML inspectors for every object on the page and limited possibilities for editing code in the Code view. Code generated by NOF remains excluded from editing in Code view.
Views
The workspace of NetObjects Fusion offers different views of the project, similar to project management software.
In Site view, the web project is laid out and structured (NOF is a site-oriented HTML generator). The visualization technology of NetObjects Fusion has been patented.[11] In a hierarchical tree structure, pages can be built and arranged. The folder structure on the web server can follow this layout or can vary – leaving the site structure only as a logical structure.
In Page view, the desktop publishing model is most obvious. The user operates with a draw-based layout editor very similar to Desktop publishing (DTP) or Computer-Aided Design (CAD) software. Toolbars offer text, image, table and other choices to design a page. Since version 8, basic bitmap editing capabilities are integrated in the image tool.
All objects can be placed accurately with pixel-level control on the page, can be aligned or evenly distributed.
With version 11, NetObjects Fusion moved along to CSS-based layout to enable pixel-level control of all objects on the page. According to the vendor, the code generation has been completely re-written to this end.[12] Earlier versions generated complex hidden tables and blind GIFs for layout.
The Team Fusion Client (coming with the NetObjects Authoring Server) had used CSS-driven layout at least since 1999.[13][14]
NetObjects Fusion release 11 still offers table-based layout as an option to maintain upwards compatibility to complex projects built with earlier versions.
Page design is divided into an interior layout and an outside masterborder area. Masterborders allow designers to have exactly the same set of objects on a given number of pages.
A tab on page view starts an integrated browser (Microsoft Internet Explorer) to show an immediate preview without leaving NOF in Internet Explorer. Netobjects Fusion 11 can show a preview also with Firefox up to 3.6.
Style view offers pre-installed or online-offered sets of designs with banners, navigation bars, backgrounds, text styles and so on. Styles can also be completely user-defined and based on Cascading Style Sheets.
Other views are Asset view, in which image and media files are managed; Publish view, which allows local previewing or remote publishing with a built-in FTP module; and Online view, which has been added with NetObjects Fusion MX (6), to get access to third party modules, tutorials or customer support.
Strengths
The user interface of NetObjects Fusion has been praised as elegant and user-friendly by users and observers.[15][16] The changed and extended interface of the versions since release 10 was reviewed less favourably.[17]
NetObjects Fusion proved to be flexible for small to medium-sized projects. For instance, novices are able to build a small site with styles that come with the product, and set up a simple online shop with the built-in e-commerce engine. Experts can take advantage of NOF's layout capabilities and use it as a mere front-end to PHP/SQL database or advanced e-commerce solutions. According to Web.com, NOF 11 now allows to connect to any "commercially relevant databases".[18]
Third-party support was one of the highlights in earlier times, but seems to have been discouraged by Website Pros' policy to offer their own components. Many formerly popular components by third-party vendors like Coolmaps or Bitmotion have been discontinued or remain in the state of just maintaining compatibility to new versions of NetObjects Fusion without further development.
Limitations
Scalability was a known problem of early versions of NetObjects Fusion. Depending on complexity and the user's working method, a single project might have reached its limits of performance and handling at a few pages. Bigger sites had to be broken into several projects causing increased management effort, especially for links and menus. Newer releases proved to be a little bit more robust. With release 11, relying on improved database connectivity and the ability to integrate XML-files into any objects on pages, scalability is not seen as an issue any more by the vendor. Though at least one user thinks otherwise.[18]
The limited access to HTML is seen as a critical flaw by many web developers. However, NetObjects Fusion was not designed to this end.
Since the acquisition of NetObjects Fusion, Website Pros kept a steady pace of new releases with enhanced functionalities. Engineering had been outsourced to Romania.[19][20] In 2008 Web.com "terminated the outsourced software development" and decided to "use existing in-house resources to assist with the future development" of NetObjects Fusion.[21][22]
Beginning with version 10, NetObjects Fusion improved compliance with modern web standards. NOF 10 (2006) came with full W3C and CSS 2.1 compliance and with a major overhaul of the user interface. However, CSS could be applied to text formatting only and page design stayed table-based. Release 11 (2008) offered CSS-positioned layout and publishing with XHTML 1.0 compliance.
Enabling typical Web 2.0 sites, a collection of AJAX widgets like accordions and tagged panels have also been introduced with release 11.[18]
Starting with release 9, Website Pros also distributed "NetObjects nPower", a collaborative content management solution, to use with NetObjects Fusion. The development of nPower was stopped after the two releases for NetObjects 9 and 10.
In November 2007, the basic version NetObjects Fusion Essentials was introduced for free download.[23] Essentials is identical with NOF release 7.5.
In July 2009, NetObjects, Inc. was re-established as an independent company. It acquired all NOF-related assets from Web.com. for approximately $4.0 million[24] and released version 12 on December 31, 2010.
The publication of books covering NetObjects Fusion has decreased with shrinking market share. In January 2009, McGraw-Hill published NetObjects Fusion 11 in their "How to Do Everything" series.
NetObjects Fusion 2015 appears to be the final release and some users have reported problems running it under Windows 10.[1]
Versions
All versions have been released in English and German. The given release year is for the English versions.
Netscape Navigator is a discontinued proprietary web browser, and the original browser of the Netscape line, from versions 1 to 4.08, and 9.x. It was the flagship product of the Netscape Communications Corp and was the dominant web browser in terms of usage share in the 1990s, but by around 2003 its user base had all but disappeared. This was partly because the Netscape Corporation did not sustain Netscape Navigator's technical innovation in the late 1990s.
Web design encompasses many different skills and disciplines in the production and maintenance of websites. The different areas of web design include web graphic design; user interface design ; authoring, including standardised code and proprietary software; user experience design ; and search engine optimization. Often many individuals will work in teams covering different aspects of the design process, although some designers will cover them all. The term "web design" is normally used to describe the design process relating to the front-end design of a website including writing markup. Web design partially overlaps web engineering in the broader scope of web development. Web designers are expected to have an awareness of usability and be up to date with web accessibility guidelines.
Gecko is a browser engine developed by Mozilla. It is used in the Firefox browser, the Thunderbird email client, and many other projects.
A HTML editor is a program used for editing HTML, the markup of a web page. Although the HTML markup in a web page can be controlled with any text editor, specialized HTML editors can offer convenience, added functionality, and organisation. For example, many HTML editors handle not only HTML, but also related technologies such as CSS, XML and JavaScript or ECMAScript. In some cases they also manage communication with remote web servers via FTP and WebDAV, and version control systems such as Subversion or Git. Many word processing, graphic design and page layout programs that are not dedicated to web design, such as Microsoft Word or Quark XPress, also have the ability to function as HTML editors.
Adobe Dreamweaver is a proprietary web development tool from Adobe Inc. It was created by Macromedia in 1997 and developed by them until Macromedia was acquired by Adobe Systems in 2005.
HomeSite was an HTML editor originally developed by Nick Bradbury. Unlike WYSIWYG HTML editors such as FrontPage and Dreamweaver, HomeSite was designed for direct editing, or "hand coding", of HTML and other website languages.
Trident is a proprietary browser engine for the Microsoft Windows version of Internet Explorer, developed by Microsoft.
Mozilla Firefox has features that allow it to be distinguished from other web browsers, such as Chrome and Internet Explorer.
A user interface markup language is a markup language that renders and describes graphical user interfaces and controls. Many of these markup languages are dialects of XML and are dependent upon a pre-existing scripting language engine, usually a JavaScript engine, for rendering of controls and extra scriptability.
NetSurf is an open-source web browser which uses its own layout engine. Its design goal is to be lightweight and portable. NetSurf provides features including tabbed browsing, bookmarks and page thumbnailing.
Microsoft Expression Web is a discontinued HTML editor and general web design software product by Microsoft. It was discontinued on December 20, 2012, and subsequently made available free of charge from Microsoft. It was a component of the also discontinued Expression Studio.
Freeway is a WYSIWYG web design application for Mac OS X developed by the British company Softpress Systems.
NetObjects, Inc. is a software company founded in 1995 by Samir Arora, David Kleinberg, Clement Mok and Sal Arora. The company is best known for the development of NetObjects Fusion, a web design application for small and medium enterprises with designers who need complete control over page layout and a similar user interface as desktop publishing applications.
The Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI) is a discontinued open-source JavaScript library for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as Ajax, DHTML, and DOM scripting. YUI includes several cores CSS resources. It is available under a BSD License. Development on YUI began in 2005 and Yahoo! properties such as My Yahoo! and the Yahoo! front page began using YUI in the summer of that year. YUI was released for public use in February 2006. It was actively developed by a core team of Yahoo! engineers.
Morfik Technology Pty Ltd. is an Australian software company that was acquired by Altium in 2010.
Windows Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) is the eighth and, by now, discontinued version of the Internet Explorer web browser for Windows. It was released by Microsoft on March 19, 2009, as the successor to Internet Explorer 7. It was the default browser in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.
Firebug is a discontinued free and open-source web browser extension for Mozilla Firefox that facilitated the live debugging, editing, and monitoring of any website's CSS, HTML, DOM, XHR, and JavaScript.
In fields employing interface design skills, slicing is the process of dividing a single 2D user interface composition layout (comp) into multiple image files of the graphical user interface (GUI) for one or more electronic pages. It is typically part of the client side development process of creating a web page and/or web site, but is also used in the user interface design process of software development and game development.
Responsive web design (RWD) or responsive design is an approach to web design that aims to make web pages render well on a variety of devices and window or screen sizes from minimum to maximum display size to ensure usability and satisfaction.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to web design and web development, two very related fields:
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
