Macromedia HomeSite

Macromedia HomeSite
Developer(s)	Nick Bradbury, Allaire, Macromedia
Initial release	September 1996;27 years ago
Final release	5.5 / September 2003;20 years ago
Operating system	Windows
Type	HTML editor
License	Trialware
Website	www.adobe.com/products/homesite/

Last updated July 06, 2024

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.

After a successful partnership with the company to distribute it alongside its own competing Dreamweaver software, HomeSite was acquired by Macromedia in 2001, after which elements of the software were integrated into Dreamweaver. Following the acquisition of Macromedia by Adobe Systems, the company announced on May 26, 2009, that HomeSite would be discontinued.^[2]^[3]

History

It was originally developed in Borland Delphi in 1995 by Nick Bradbury. Bradbury wrote HomeSite after using HotDog and being frustrated with it. In March 1997 Allaire Corporation from Cambridge, Massachusetts (founded by brothers Jeremy and J.J. Allaire) acquired HomeSite and Nick Bradbury joined Allaire. After leaving Allaire in 1998, Bradbury went on to work on the CSS/xHTML editor TopStyle and the RSS reader FeedDemon. Macromedia acquired Allaire in 2001 and was in turn acquired by Adobe in 2005.

At Allaire, a version of HomeSite was created as an IDE for ColdFusion, selling as ColdFusion Studio. This version was later merged into Coldfusion MX under Macromedia, and was then called HomeSite+. Development of HomeSite continued in parallel, though the standalone HomeSite was still sold separately.

In the days that HomeSite was under Nick Bradbury, and then part of Allaire, it had an enthusiastic following from its user community. While many software companies at the time had WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) website creation tools where the user never saw the code, Nick Bradbury created a product that was code centric and popular with those that preferred to work directly in the code, a concept that was dubbed "What You See Is What You Need." Further he built in a variety of ways that users could customize the user interface and extend the functionality. Allaire kept this concept going as its target market of ColdFusion users were code-centric as well. Allaire developers expanded upon Nick's original HomeSite capabilities by adding features like built-in scripting, improved syntax coloring, and VTML for tag insight and tag editors.

Macromedia licensed a copy of HomeSite to include in Windows versions of Dreamweaver 1.0 (Mac versions bundled BBEdit). This OEM deal started the relationship between the companies and eventually led to the acquisition of Allaire by Macromedia in 2001. Although Macromedia improved the hand coding features in Dreamweaver 6.0 (MX) to be more on par with HomeSite, the company continued to produce both products separately, stating that "both products are excellent for their specific purposes."^[4] Macromedia was then acquired by Adobe in 2005. In May 2009, Adobe elected to cease development of HomeSite, and no longer supports the product, though they still maintain a forum for active users . Instead, existing HomeSite users are asked to consider switching to the newest version of Dreamweaver.^[2]

Versions

Homesite 1.x (September 1996)
Allaire Homesite 2.0
Allaire Homesite 2.5a (1997)
Allaire HomeSite 3.0 (November 1997)
Allaire HomeSite 4.0 (November 1998)
Allaire HomeSite 4.5 (1999)
Macromedia HomeSite 5.0 (2001)
Macromedia HomeSite 5.2 (January 2003)
Macromedia HomeSite 5.5 (September 2003)

There was also another version called HomeSite+ which was included in Dreamweaver MX 2004 and greater. HomeSite+ had additional functionality for ColdFusion application development, and was generally comparable to the version of HomeSite formerly called ColdFusion Studio. HomeSite+/CF Studio versions parallel standalone HomeSite versions.

Features

Customizable interface that includes dockable toolbars with custom buttons, a snippet manager with "tag snippets," and custom dialogs and wizards written in the VTML language.
Extensively script-able to automate tasks or to perform advanced tasks using JavaScript or VBScript
Macro recorder can record a series of actions to create scripts for later playback
Enhanced code snippets save time by creating and saving reusable blocks of code, and can prompt for variable replacement when used.
Customizable syntax color-coding for ASP, CFML, CSS, HTML, Java, JavaScript, JSP, Perl, PHP, SQL, VBScript, VTML and XHTML. Syntax-coloring parser syntax and examples are available to help users to extend or write their own.
Search and replace utility
CSS editing via the included TopStyle Lite, or via integration with the full version of TopStyle, if available
Check your code with the built-in Code Validator, or use CSE HTML Validator with UI integration
Customizable code formatting formats your code to standards with Code Sweeper or HTML Tidy.
Integrated help browser shows installed help docs or HTML-format document sets added by the user. Useful for local, searchable copies of standards, tutorials, language references, etc.
Project management and built-in FTP help manage and upload websites
Built-in tools for page link-checking, document weight and spell-checking
Works with source and version control software that supports SCCI, and with other packages via custom toolbars
Assign keyboard shortcuts to almost any function, or to your own scripts or code snippets
The integrated browser view and the external browser list let you view your edited document quickly in your choice of browsers.
Available in French and German (older versions only, 5.5 is English-only)
XHTML 1.0 Support
Extensive right-click menu library including the ability to select an entire tag.^[5]

Related Research Articles

Adobe Flash is a discontinued multimedia software platform used for production of animations, rich internet applications, desktop applications, mobile apps, mobile games, and embedded web browser video players.

Macromedia, Inc., was an American graphics, multimedia, and web development software company (1992–2005) headquartered in San Francisco, California, that made products such as Flash and Dreamweaver. It was purchased by its rival Adobe Systems on December 3, 2005.

Adobe GoLive was a WYSIWYG HTML editor and web site management application from Adobe Systems. It replaced Adobe PageMill as Adobe's primary HTML editor and was itself discontinued in favor of Dreamweaver. The last version of GoLive that Adobe released was GoLive 9.

Adobe Dreamweaver is a proprietary web development tool from Adobe. It was created by Macromedia in 1997 and developed by them until Macromedia was acquired by Adobe Systems in 2005.

Adobe Creative Suite (CS) is a discontinued software suite of graphic design, video editing, and web development applications developed by Adobe Systems.

Adobe ColdFusion is a commercial rapid web-application development computing platform created by J. J. Allaire in 1995. ColdFusion was originally designed to make it easier to connect simple HTML pages to a database. By version 2 (1996) it had become a full platform that included an IDE in addition to a full scripting language.

Lingo is a verbose object-oriented (OO) scripting language developed by John H. Thompson for use in Adobe Director. Lingo is used to develop desktop application software, interactive kiosks, CD-ROMs and Adobe Shockwave content.

ColdFusion Markup Language, more commonly known as CFML, is a scripting language for web development that runs on the Java virtual machine (JVM), the .NET framework, and Google App Engine. Several commercial and free and open-source software implementations of CFML engines are available, including Adobe ColdFusion, Lucee, New Atlanta BlueDragon, Railo, Open BlueDragon, and other CFML server engines.

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.

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.

Jeremy D. Allaire is an American technologist and Internet entrepreneur. He is CEO and founder of the digital currency company Circle and chairman of the board of Brightcove. With his brother JJ Allaire, he is a co-founder of the Allaire Corporation in 1995, which had an IPO in January 1999 and was acquired by Macromedia in 2001. Allaire was chief technology officer (CTO) of Macromedia after the acquisition and helped develop the Macromedia MX platform.

Allaire Corporation was a computer software company founded by Jeremy and JJ Allaire in Minnesota, later headquartered in Cambridge, then Newton, Massachusetts. It commenced operations in May 1995, had its initial public offering on NASDAQ in January 1999, and was acquired by rival Macromedia in early 2001.

Tumult Whisk is an application for Apple's Mac OS X developed by Jonathan Deutsch.

CSS HTML Validator is an HTML editor and CSS editor for Windows that helps web developers create syntactically correct and accessible HTML/HTML5, XHTML, and CSS documents by locating errors, potential problems like browser compatibility issues, and common mistakes. It is also able to check links, check spelling, suggest improvements, alert developers to deprecated, obsolete, or proprietary tags, attributes, and CSS properties, and find issues that can affect search engine optimization.

Adobe FreeHand was a computer application for creating two-dimensional vector graphics oriented primarily to professional illustration, desktop publishing and content creation for the Web. FreeHand was similar in scope, intended market, and functionality to Adobe Illustrator, CorelDRAW and Xara Designer Pro. Because of FreeHand's dedicated page layout and text control features, it also compares to Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress. Professions using FreeHand include graphic design, illustration, cartography, fashion and textile design, product design, architects, scientific research, and multimedia production.

Adobe ColdFusion Builder is the name for Adobe's Eclipse-based development IDE that can be used to build applications for ColdFusion. The product's original codename, "Bolt", is a reference to the original lightning icon for ColdFusion from the Allaire days. In 2010, Adobe released the product and officially renamed it Adobe ColdFusion Builder, often referred to as CFBuilder.

Brackets is a source code editor with a primary focus on web development. Created by Adobe Inc., it is free and open-source software licensed under the MIT License, and is currently maintained on GitHub by open-source developers. It is written in JavaScript, HTML and CSS. Brackets is cross-platform, available for macOS, Windows, and most Linux distributions. The main purpose of Brackets is its live HTML, CSS and JavaScript editing functionality.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nick Bradbury</span> American software developer

Nick Bradbury is an American software developer and entrepreneur. Bradbury is noted for creating the early web-development editors HomeSite and TopStyle, and FeedDemon, the RSS news aggregator for Microsoft Windows. Currently, he is a mobile developer at the software company Automattic. He is a graduate of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and currently resides in Knoxville, Tennessee.

References

↑ "Macromedia HomeSite". CNET . CBS Interactive. 13 August 2007. Retrieved 2 April 2015.
1 2 "HomeSite development ended effective May 26, 2009". Adobe Systems. Archived from the original on 2014-02-09.
↑ "FOSS v proprietary software: Website creation". ZDNet .
↑ "Macromedia HomeSite - Dreamweaver MX FAQ". Macromedia . Adobe Systems. 2002. Archived from the original on 2013-10-29.
↑ "Macromedia Homesite 5". Archived from the original on 2012-10-18. Retrieved 2012-08-31.

External links

ASP4HS ASP, PHP, .Net, XML, XSL, SQL development extensions for HomeSite, user community add-on repository
Homesite Custom Dialogs
About.com Resources
Marjolein's Help for HomeSite Users
Bradbury Software
Nick Bradbury's Blog

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.

[1] "Macromedia HomeSite". CNET . CBS Interactive. 13 August 2007. Retrieved 2 April 2015.

[Adobe-2] 1 2 "HomeSite development ended effective May 26, 2009". Adobe Systems. Archived from the original on 2014-02-09.

[3] "FOSS v proprietary software: Website creation". ZDNet .

[HomeSite_FAQ-4] "Macromedia HomeSite - Dreamweaver MX FAQ". Macromedia . Adobe Systems. 2002. Archived from the original on 2013-10-29.

[5] "Macromedia Homesite 5". Archived from the original on 2012-10-18. Retrieved 2012-08-31.

[1]

[2]

[3]

[4]

[5]