Adobe PageMill

» see adobe.com/products/pagemill as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

the first time i needed to build a web page, the path was hand-typed html in notepad, uploaded via ftp. that was the late 1990s in turkey on a 33.6k modem. pagemill existed but it was on the mac, and nobody i knew owned a mac. it also cost money. the windows release came in february 1998, three years after the mac version, and by then it was already old. i learned html instead.

adobe pagemill 1.0 was released in late 1995 for macintosh. adobe had acquired the underlying product earlier that year from ceneca communications, a small bay area startup whose engineers had built a wysiwyg html editor at a time when "wysiwyg html" was a phrase most people had not yet heard. the first version shipped about 30,000 copies in its first month, which was the fastest start any adobe product had had to that point. for context, that was on the order of the launch volume photoshop had reached only a couple of years earlier.

pagemill 2.0 followed in october 1996, with sitemill 2.0 (a site-management companion) and a bundled photoshop le. version 3.0 reached windows in february 1998 and mac in november 1998. after that there was no 4.0. adobe acquired golive systems in early 1999 for its more capable cyberstudio product, and pagemill was demoted to the consumer entry point while golive picked up the professional segment. then in 2000 adobe stopped shipping pagemill entirely. the product was five years old.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was ~

pagemill made you a web designer in the sense that it produced files that browsers opened. you typed text on a blank canvas, then dragged an image from the desktop. to make a link you highlighted a word and pasted a url after hitting cmd-shift-h. behind the scenes the app generated html, and behind that it would generate frame-sets and image-maps if you wanted them. that was unusual for 1995, when the alternative was hand-coding html in bbedit or simpletext while reading a printed copy of the html 2.0 spec.

the html it produced was not always clean. pagemill loved nested font tags and table-based layouts. designers who later switched to dreamweaver or back to hand-coded html would talk about "cleaning the pagemill garbage" out of their files. that complaint was real but it was also the price of the actual value proposition, which was that a writer or a marketer who did not know html could put a page on the web in an afternoon.

~ how it ended ~

adobe's golive acquisition in january 1999 set the end date. golive cyberstudio 4 was a more advanced product than pagemill 3.0. it handled sites with more than ten pages without choking, with much better css and dhtml support. adobe paid roughly $200 million in stock for it. once that was done, pagemill was on borrowed time. version 3.0 was the last release. by the end of 2000 there was no pagemill on the price list. golive 5.0 shipped that summer and absorbed the consumer segment.

~ what remains ~

pagemill set the template for every wysiwyg html editor that followed. drag-and-drop image placement and click-to-link became the standard moves. behind every action the editor generated html so the user did not have to. microsoft frontpage took the model and pushed it down-market for business owners. macromedia dreamweaver took the model and pushed it up-market for professional shops. that left pagemill in the middle with no clear position, which is a death sentence for any product in adobe's catalog. the legacy is that nobody learned html on pagemill, because pagemill saved them from learning html, and that is much of the reason the early web grew as fast as it did.

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