Review of Macromedia Contribute as a HTML Editor
Eoin Campbell, XML Workshop Ltd.
This document contains a quick review of Macromedia Contribute v2.0, mainly from an accessibility perspective. Contribute is a low-cost, WYSIWYG HTML editor and website maintenance tool, which is a low-end alternative to the more full-featured and complex Dreamweaver product. Some of the nice features of Contribute are the following.
- WYSIWYG editing interface
- Ability to use Dreamweaver templates, and control editing to defined areas of the page
- Directory-based access control rights, which permits each user or user group to maintain only their own area
- Integrated FTP publishing of edited pages, and offline editing of pages
- Revision and version control, to retain old page versions, and lock files for editing.
These features show that Contribute is intended as both an editing and a management tool. Only the editing features are considered in this review, so it is not intended to be comprehensive. The following issues are considered.
- Support for technical web standards
- Support for content imported from Microsoft Word
The following issues are not considered, but may be more important than the issues above for some organisations.
- Ease of use
- Purchase, setup, training and support costs
- Content migration effort
- Minimum hardware requirements
Technical web standards
The following technical standards are important for public sector organisations and we checked how well Contribute supports each.
- HTML 4.01/XHTML 1.0 Strict DTD
- Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Guidelines
- Dublin Core Metadata Element Set
HTML DTD validation and support
Contribute claims to support the ability to enforce DTD compliance and XHTML (cf.
http://www.macromedia.com/software/contribute/productinfo/features/static_tour/04standards.html#07). However, this could not be verified.
Accessibility support
Contribute claims to support the generation of accessible HTML pages, but this support seems very limited. The following is a brief list of unsupported items that would be required to fully support accessibility guidelines.
- Ability to specify the language of text using the lang attribute (e.g. a paragraph or phrase)
- Ability to mark up acronyms or abbreviations and provide an expanded form (e.g. <acronym title="Hypertext Markup Language>HTML</acronym>)
- Ability to enforce compliance with a Strict DTD
- Ability to enter a summary attribute for tables
Dublin Core Metadata
Contribute supports only the Keywords and Description meta fields. Dublin Core or site-specific metadata is not supported.
Microsoft Word support
Most material for websites is repurposed from Microsoft Word, so it is important that Word documents can be imported easily and correctly. It is possible to paste text from Word into Contribute, but the visual presentation is incorrect, and manual cleanup is invariably required.
The inserted markup is also quite poor, as it contains extra superfluous markup (font specifications, etc.), and styled Word text (lists, headings) are not mapped correctly into equivalent HTML markup.
