In case you hadn't noticed, boys and girls, web authoring isn't as much fun as it used to be. Remember the good old days when a web site consisted of a single HTML file and a couple of GIF images? You'd crank out the page in Windows Notepad, boot up your FTP client, upload a few files to your Unix server, and you'd be done. Pass GO, collect two hundered dollars, on to the next site. Holy smokes, what's happened to the web lately? Java applets, animated graphics, PDF's, databases, downloadable fonts... how are you supposed to keep track of all of those source files? And the technologies! CGI, Active Server Pages, DHTML, Shockwave, Acrobat, JavaScript... who can keep up with all that crap? Every time you wanna edit something, you gotta start up a new application. On top of that, you build web sites for a living, so you're publishing to Unix servers, Windows NT servers, Domino servers, CD-ROMs... what was that FTP user ID and password again? Nope, it just ain't like the good old days. The creative part is still fun, but the techno part is more like rocket science. Yeah, Rocket Science, that's what it is.
You know what would be cool? An application that did the techo stuff for you so that you could just, you know, MAKE STUFF! Like, you could make a web page, and then the software would figure out what was on it and automatically keep all of your files together for you. And then to edit a file, you would just click on it and the software would automatically load it into the right application for that type of file. It would even show you thumbnail images so you could click on a picture instead of a file name. And then the software would automatically publish everything for you. Not just to a Unix server or an NT server, but to ANY server, or maybe just to a CD-ROM or a directory on your network. Yup, now that would rock fully. Something that did the Rocket Science part for you. But where would you find such an application? Who would be diabolically clever enough to build such kick-ass piece of software? Hmmmmmm...
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