Claris HomePage

» see claris.com/products/homepage as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Claris HomePage was the WYSIWYG HTML editor Apple's Claris subsidiary released in August 1996, three months before Adobe shipped PageMill 2.0 and a few months before Microsoft put FrontPage on every Windows 95 office desk. It was developed by Sam Schillace and Steve Newman, who had built it in the mid-1990s as the kind of editor you used if you did not want to write HTML by hand. Drag a text box, drag an image, set a link target, save and FTP. The output was HTML 3.2 with the usual deep tag soup of the era.

HomePage 2.0 added forms and frames in 1997. HomePage 3.0 shipped in January 1998 and was the version that actually mattered, because it shipped with templates for FileMaker Pro-backed dynamic websites using something called CDML (Claris Dynamic Markup Language). You could build a queryable database site without writing any server code, with the FileMaker box as your application server. For 1998, that was an interesting story.

And then 1998 happened to Claris. Apple, mid-Steve Jobs return, decided the consumer software subsidiary did not need to exist. Claris was dissolved into a new FileMaker Inc. that kept exactly one product line, FileMaker Pro. HomePage was retained as a Claris-branded zombie for a few years to feed the existing CDML user base, with no new development. The official discontinuation came in 2001. Sam Schillace eventually went to Google and led the team that built Google Docs.

in 1998 i was on a windows 98 box hand-coding my first frmtr signatures in notepad over a 33.6k connection. claris homepage was a mac product i could not have bought even if i had wanted to, since macs in turkey were ad-agency machines, not student machines. the wysiwyg editor i did eventually meet was microsoft frontpage express, free with internet explorer, terrible at every nested table.

~ the record ~

~ what it actually was ~

HomePage's selling point was that it was an Apple-branded product that did not feel like a Microsoft product. The UI was clean by 1996 Mac standards, the file management was sane, and it produced HTML that mostly worked across Netscape 3 and Internet Explorer 3. It did not do CSS in any serious way, but neither did anyone else at consumer level.

The FileMaker integration in version 3.0 was the one thing the editor did that PageMill and FrontPage did not. You could publish a FileMaker database as a website with a few clicks, get a form-based query interface for free, and edit the templates in HomePage. For a small business that already used FileMaker for its inventory or customer list, this was a low-friction way to put that data on the web.

~ how it ended ~

The dissolution of Claris in early 1998 was the real death event. Apple kept FileMaker because FileMaker had a real business customer base willing to pay for upgrades. HomePage, like ClarisWorks (which became AppleWorks) and Claris Emailer and Claris Organizer, did not have that base. The version 3.0 release in January 1998 was the last new HomePage. Everything after was sustaining engineering and shrinkwrap inventory.

By 2001 the dynamic-site model had moved to PHP and ASP and database-driven CMS systems, the WYSIWYG editor of choice was Macromedia Dreamweaver, and FileMaker's web-publishing story moved to Web Companion and later Instant Web Publishing inside FileMaker itself. Claris HomePage was officially discontinued, and the few sites still running on CDML kept working until their FileMaker servers were upgraded out from under them.

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