What’s Wrong With iWeb?

iWeb makes making pretty web pages seem pretty easy. Unfortunately, like many of the iLife suite applications were in their early versions, iWeb is a work in progress. I visited a friend’s site today. He made his site with iWeb and it looks reasonably nice but for a simple, yet major problem. Reading the site, I found the body text to be a little tough to read. Initially, I thought it was my dear friend’s mistake of using a serif font for the body text on a web page. “No problem,” I thought, “I
‘ll just increase the font size.” (Safari is nice this way)…

HUH? No dice. The titles increased in size, but the body text did not.

Now, I knew this was odd, because Safari has no trouble overriding font sizes and making text a size the user wants to read. Safari can override CSS font size declarations as well as old-school HTML font attributes. But this was different.

My only recourse was to view the source code of the page and try to find out what was going on. Ouch. What horrible code hath iWeb wrought? I couldn’t find the body text without searching the file! So much junk in there… Aha! Found it.

iWeb had done something very strange. It had rendered all of the body text as .png graphic files. Perhaps Apple thought this would ensure that pages look like what iWeb users expected them to look like, rather than facing the reality that HTML/XHTML is a fluid medium, where font sizes and layouts are never guaranteed. I don’t know what Apple was thinking.

I did a little Googling, and looked at Apple’s Discussion forums for iWeb. No immediate answers, only some hints. The iWeb Discussion forum is very indicative of the complete lack of understanding of web sites by consumers. Pretty scary. Apple should consider devoting large portions of iLife development to educating it’s users about technology. Like the System 7 days… please!

Anyway, it turns out that iWeb attempts to render .png graphics where necessary. Problem is, it is not very smart or sophisticated at all about how it decides this. In fact there is no obvious or guaranteed reasons that I could find that it produces .png files instead of text. I’m sure iLife 07, due out soon, will address this to some degree, because the current results are horrid.
What makes this worse is, the text still exists in the alt attributes of the img elements that contain the .png files. Pretty convoluted, but sort of addresses screen readers…

So if you are considering using iWeb now, consider its best value is the .mac and iLife integration. If you want better web pages, sadly, I would easily recommend using Microsoft Word at this time. Better, learn HTML/XHTML and CSS. It’s not that tough.