Hot Dog Professional 6

Richard Price
25 July 2000

If you are some sort of Web masochist who still believes web pages should be coded by hand, HotDog Professional 6 from Sausage should go some way towards restoring your sanity.

Over the years HotDog has built up a loyal band of enthusiastic supporters. Looking at the new features and improvements in HotDog 6, it is easy to see why.

Who says you can't teach an old dog new tricks. Users of previous versions are probably salivating over the text editing support now provided for the more popular Web scripting languages such as JavaScript, CSS, ASP, VBScript and of course HTML.

Coding by hand is all very well if you only have a few pages to worry about. As Web design becomes far more complicated you need all the help you can get. Large sites can be difficult to keep track of and manage.

With HotDog Professional 6 you can create, add, remove and edit Web site files within a single view. I like the way you can now perform global changes to document properties, text or even meta tags.

An error-checker allows you to verify and edit all links and resources used in your site.

You also have the ability to publish an entire site or just the changes.

HotDog Professional 6 allows you to open documents and easily locate the code you need to edit. Complex code is distilled into a structured tree view, which can be filtered to only show certain tags or objects.

New dockable Resources Panels include a JavaScript wizard and a style sheet manager.

Most Web sites these days make extensive use of cascading style sheets. Hotdog 6 now makes it a lot easier to import, edit or create CSS style sheets.

With the help of an intuitive Wizard you can apply style sheets with confidence.

HotDog Professional 6 is only available on-line. You can either download a 30 trial version or purchase it.

The only problem I have with on-line purchasing is the lack of easily accessible help. Sure, there is a comprehensive amount of information in the help files available, but it is not necessarily the easiest way to find your way around a new program.

Call me old fashioned, but I find paging through a paper-based manual much quicker.

Further help is also available from their Web site, where you can access FAQs, participate in discussions or access monitored Sausage Island Web Forums.

First time users may find the interface a little confusing at first, but the functionality of HotDog, helped by a few Wizards, make even the most complex tasks appear easy.

Professional users should find everything they need to create sophisticated Web sites.

HotDog Profession 6 is part of the Sausage family of Web authoring tools which include HotDog Junior and Hotdog PageWiz.

HotDog Professional 6 runs on an IBM-Compatible PC Pentium (Pentium II or better recommended), Windows 95, 98 or NT 4.0 with a minimum 32 MB RAM (64 MB RAM recommended).

This new version of HotDog has been streamlined to ensure it uses no more than 20% of available system resources. So users of previous version should notice the difference.

Of course, they are not the only dog on the block anymore. There are a host of other programs to choose from. But with HotDog Professional 6 you are at least getting a lot more bite than bark.

www.sausage.com

By Richard Price, Editor, EnergyME.com

For information on getting a product reviewed email richard@energyme.com