You know the saying: Start up, kick butt, cash out. The Web power tool formerly known as GoLive CyberStudio opened its can of butt-kick last year with a feature-packed version 3.0 (Aug/98, p48) aimed squarely at the upper echelon of professional Web developers. In January, Adobe Systems acquired GoLive Systems and the rights to CyberStudio, and now it has released its own incarnation of the product, GoLive 4.0.
For its cash, Adobe got a mature product adept with the latest DHTML technologies, able to manage large sites incrementally, full of the latest WYSIWYG and drag-and-drop tricks to facilitate visual Web authoring, yet still respectful of HTML markup — a product Adobe would surely like to evolve into the Photoshop of Web publishing. The first step on the road to industry dominance is obvious, if not immediately gratifying for Mac addicts: cross-platform (Windows) compatibihty. In the grand scheme, this is actually a key feature that will keep Mac-loyal professionals in the game, whatever hardware their design teammates use.
Given the vagaries of Web technology — the evolving JavaScript and HTML specifications, browser peculiarities, and other proprietary code — flexibility is crucial in a serious development tool. Adobe GoLive 4.0 comes through — it offers tight user control over both the production environment and the final output, be it a couple of pages or a massive database- driven Web site. Within the extensive Preferences dialog box you’ll find a Modules Manager, which lets you toggle certain features on and off, including WebObjects and PNG image support, site management, foreign language encoding, and a number of GoLive’s nonessential editing and preview modes. This is a nice touch, considering the potential for user confusion amid the overwhelming (in some cases redundant) array of functional options and methods.
GoLive requires certain Modules to do its work. The Web Database, for instance, is the cornerstone of GoLive 4.0, even though you may never open it. HTML purists will start here, where they can adjust their code’s format and syntax on a tag-by-tag basis. The Web Database covers the entire HTML 3.2 specification, a subset of the emerging 4.0 standard, as well as browser-specific and otherwise unsupported tags. The database also provides full compatibility tag sets for the various interpretations of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Advanced users will set up camp here, redefining the format and function of any tag in custom CSS sets through the convenient Inspector Window, while watching their styles take form instantly in Layout view. You also use the Tag Database to configure the optional WebObjects Module and to handle instructions for Extensible Markup (XML) and ASP tags. Guru-level users can teach GoLive 4.0 to accommodate almost any proprietary code.
Integration is a recurring theme in GoLive 4.0’s new features, though it doesn’t focus primarily on Adobe’s other design tools as you might expect. Your graphics and multimedia applications are still a click away, but GoLive 4.0 handles the tedious process of checking URLs that can seriously bog down work including rich media and plug-in-dependent files such as QuickTime 3, Adobe’s own PDF, and Macromedia’s Flash and Shockwave. Provided you’re working within a defined site, GoLive’s link-parsing mechanism creates an editable list of all external links — including those embedded in most types of multimedia files — sparing you a trip to another authoring program just to change a link or two. GoLive updates local links within the site, with or without an alert box, every time you update the Site Window. This is a product of GoLive’s tight integration with the Mac OS’s Finder, a relationship that also benefits the Site Window with spring-loaded navigation, dynamic scrolling, and full drag-and-drop support.
The integrated QuickTime Movie Editor is a real treat, even though it doesn’t provide for creation or time editing of video tracks. Once you have imported your audio and video tracks, you can subject them to the full array of QuickTime 3’s effects and transitions; or you can add Hypertext Reference Tags, Text, and Sprite tracks to create interactive, hot-linkable movies. When it’s time to plug in the movie — or almost any other form of plug-in-based media — GoLive loads the Inspector Window with parameters for several media types.
GoLive raises an unfikely question: Is it possible to provide too much drag-and-drop functionality? To Adobe’s credit, the interface is generally smooth and manageable, but unfortunately it carries on GoLive CyberStudio’s legacy of icon overload. Even basic tasks often require several steps to complete, and those slick, context-sensitive inspectors easily ambush the uninitiated. The Hothelp cues help, but these tell you only what the icon stands for, not which of the Inspector Window’s multiple personalities will appear or what to do with it. Like any fun power tool, GoLive can complicate things if you don’t know what you’re doing — but that’s what Undo is for.
Coucouvanis, Niko. (July 1999). Adobe GoLive 4.0. MacAddict. (pgs. 46-47).
Adobe Systems, Inc.
Applications
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2020-09-13 / 
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Adobe_GoLive_4.zip
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
SheepShaver
