just am extraordinarily curious about "Adobe GoLive 6"

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Jun 07, 2005 at 08:35:54PM -0400, Zbigniew Koziol wrote:
> Have a bad luck to take care of web site of my friend, who himself is 
> ignorant rather in web development but has large ambitions to change that.

Step one should be to learn html and a real text editor (with html
highlighting perhaps), since using any of the awful web writing tools is
NOT how you learn anything good or useful about making web sites.

> There are a few points here.
> 
> 1. I run apache web server on a Linux.
> 2. He checks his work by opening a file from Windows computer (not from 
> a web server).

Great way to check if you page works, as long as your web site consists
of only one page.  Links that work in such a test often do not work on a
real web server using http.

> In his case the web site works fine. In my case does not. And I am 
> afraid that it can not.
> 
> Why? The web site is done by using "Adobe GoLive 6" - what a hell is 
> that, btw? It is based on a heavy use of JavaScript. However, the 
> directory structure is not "vertical" but "horizontal" while paths to 
> scripts and images are encoded as relative and, from the server "point 
> of view" they go outside of server document root directory..

Well apache can be made less secure to allow doing symlinks to outside
and of coruse aliases can be set up to make scripts work.  Often scripts
are stored outside the website dirs.  An alias is used to make a
location that looks like it is inside the web site actually be somewhere
else where scritps are stored.

> The site could run if URL had the address 
> http://www.my-silyy-first-steps-in-html.com/my-really-first-step/
> 
> But it could not run with URL
> http://www.my-silyy-first-steps-in-html.com/

Well apache's rewrite module or perhaps an alias can fix that too.  Or
perhaps the user just used the wrong options setting up the site in the
program.

> Now, my question is, who are really ignorants here: me, they (this case 
> is rather not doubtfull), or perhaps Adobe?

Adobe probably assumes anyone using such a tool will host it in a rather
dumbed down windows web server where only their stuff is running.

> As an additional note, a something of social nature of programming, 
> about the pains a person like me earning for living that way has to pass 
> sometime ;) They say: you will take care to improve the code later. But 
> the point is that improving code of others (in fact a machine generated 
> code) is the most difficult task a programmer would like to receive... I 
> would rather write the code from scratch myself.. but than they will not 
> be able to use "Adobe GoLive 6" ;)))
> 
> Any advise?

Tell them to go host it somewhere else and avoid the stress?

I don't know if I have ever seen a good web site design done with any
web design tool.  Certainly frontpage generates awful code (and breaks
html pages just by opening them).  Dreamweaver is perfectly able to
generate code that only netscape4 can render (even IE can't deal with it
if you turn on some really dumb options they give you).  I haven't seen
Adobe's tool, but I doubt it is any better.  They assume the web server
will let them do anything, some assume windows path names (that's so
nice when you get it on a non windows web server), and they often don't
even follow html standards but generate code that only works with some
browsers when with small changes they could have worked everywhere.

Lennart Sorensen
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