What is an HTML Generator?

Freeway Pro and Freeway Express are HTML generators. What does this mean?

This means Freeway will write all the code necessary to describe your pages so that they display on the web just the way you designed them.

The best analogy for this is to relate Freeway to DTP (desktop publishing) for print. Imagine you are creating a magazine page or a brochure. If you're a professional, you'd likely be using QuarkExpress or InDesign. You'd lay out your page the way you want it to look, adding graphics as required, choosing and employing fonts that look good and are coherent with each other, and then you'd send the final product to the printer or some other output device. Your expectation would be that, depending on the output device, what you designed on the screen would be pretty much what you were going to see on the hard copy.

This process for print is so second nature to all of us now that we forget that the printer can’t see what we have on the screen—it reads the code that your design software has written to describe your page. This code is likely to be PostScript and it is comparable in function to HTML on the web. What Freeway does is to adopt this DTP paradigm and to seamlessly, behind the scenes, write the HTML so that when you send your page to the output device (in Freeway's case the web) it will display the way you intended.

There may be some small variations between browsers and machines viewing your pages, but generally Freeway does a terrific job of producing consistent results with its clean and efficient code. It also allows the user to add extra code for special/dynamic effects either in the form of Freeway Actions (encapsulated and reusable snippets of web functionality or code) or as markup.

Every time you make a change, Freeway completely re-writes the code to display the page.

To think of Freeway in the same way as you think of your print design tools is exactly right–you design what looks good in your mind's eye and Freeway makes it happen.

Can Freeway import the code from other web sites?

Freeway Pro has a Get HTML function, but it is not a 100% solution and generally you will need to do some fettling.

The advantage of using an HTML generator, as opposed to a code editor, is that a generator works at a more abstracted level than a code editor. This manifests in a number of different ways, for example internal links within a site will never break, images can be automatically combined and converted from non-web to web formats, and the code is always clean and efficient, no matter how long you've been working on your site or how many changes you've made.

Freeway was developed to offer the greatest possible flexibility for the creation of websites from scratch. You can simply drag and drop images from your current site in the browser directly onto your Freeway page. Text can be copied and pasted from the browser directly into HTML items within your document.

Should you want to recreate the site completely, you can use Master pages to place any common elements quickly and easily on pages throughout your site...saving you loads of time.

Can you edit the code Freeway produces?

Not really. You can add code as above, but if you edit the code Freeway will simply overwrite your changes when it next publishes.