You’ve got to stand out somehow. Symantec bills Visual Page as the “Web page builder for busy professionals,” leaving the field wide open for others to sell to professionals with time on their hands. But seriously, folks, in some respects Symantec has a point.
Visual Page’s interface will come as no surprise to users of Adobe PageMill or Claris Home Page. You work on your page within a browserlike window, with a familiar toolbar across the top. Type or drag in text, format it, and watch it embolden or italicize. Drag in a graphics file (Visual Page converts PICTs, but not TIFFs, to GIFs) and resize the image: Either drag it, or double-click on it to bring up an Image Properties palette and then type in Height and Width. Unfortunately, there is no proportion lock, as in Adobe Photoshop, so you’ll have to do some calculation to keep the image from distorting. Other tools you’d expect are here: text and graphics alignment (Visual Page handles text wrapping around images very well); link creation; Insert line, Anchor, or Plug-in; and table and form creation. Visual Page creates and handles frames almost exacdy the way PageMill does and can preview content within the application. All in all, not much to surprise a veteran of the WYSIWYG wars.
However, under the Potemkin village-like placidity of Visual Page’s interface lurk noteworthy features and capabilities. Not only can you insert objects such as QuickTime movies, Java applets, and other plug-in content, you can actually preview the content “live” within Visual Page (to see applets, you need a Power Mac with the Mac OS Runtime for Java). You can resize objects by dragging their borders. However, animated GIFs don’t animate,
Another surprise is the Download Remote Site feature. If you like someone’s site, why not grab it, images and all? Give Visual Page an URL and watch it thieve away, though some Java applets may stymie these plans. Conversely, you can upload files or whole sites with Visual Page’s built-in FTP capabilities. Also, Visual Page can help you do some basic edits on your images, make transparent GIFs, and plot client-side image maps, usually within a simple interface. Building a table is easy: Click the Table button, then drag rows, columns, and headers. Visual Page supports cell coloring per the HTML 3.2 specifications. As for color. Visual Page provides only a small palette of colors, but by going to the Other option, you can access the Apple Color Picker, in which you can use either Pantone ColorWeb (see review, Dec/96, p68) or the browser-safe 216-color palette (downloadable at Lynda Weinman’s site, at <http://www.lynda.com>). The Download Statistics feature tells you how long it will take a selected graphic or a whole page to transmit.
Still, Visual Page is not just Home Page plus a few features. The working environment is a bit different. Visual Page works best when you open the Site Window, which ultimately should mimic the file structure of your site. Because Visual Page is so drag-and-drop aware, you can manage your links best by leaving this window open: You create hyperlinks to other files by selecting text and dragging the file from the Site Window onto the text. Keeping the dual page/site focus takes some practice, but soon you’ll find this a powerful way to deal with site management.
Two last good things — and two bad. Uniquely in Visual Page, you can have both the WYSIWYG and HTML windows open at the same time, so you can nudge a table visually and see the live update in code. Alternately, you can tweak the code and see what the result looks like. Not only is this a timesaver, but it’s a great way to learn the subtleties of HTML. Also, Visual Page is unique among the WYSIWYG editors in that it generates textbook-perfect HTML — no “naturalsizeflag” tags, no infinite, invisible spacers. Innovation is good, but bad code is just bad code.
The bad things? No eyedropper feature; we couldn’t match the colors of a stolen Web page (see photo) . The worst problem, though, has to be the documentation; It comes in HTML format only, is woefully incomplete, and is poorly organized. Make your voice heard! Sacrifice those trees for printed manuals!
All in all, Visual Page comes across like the quiet cousin of the WYSIWYG family: sort of looks like the rest but underneath has a good deal of strength and creativity, despite a few quirks.
Turner, D. D. (June 1997). Visual Page 1.0. MacAddict. (pg. 66).
Symantec Corporation
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2021-12-05 / 
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Visual_Page.zip
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
