HotDog

» see sausage.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

hotdog was on the shareware cds and the cover-disk magazines in the late '90s. for me on a 56k ttnet connection in '99 or '00 the html editor of choice was usually notepad. or front page express that came bundled with ie. hotdog was a name i recognized from those cds though, even if i did not actually install it as a daily driver. by the time i was writing forum signatures for donanimhaber and frmtr in the early '00s, the workflow was hand-edit the html in notepad and drop it into the bbcode field, then refresh the post to see if it rendered. the heavier html editors were what you used for actual pages, not signatures.

hotdog 1.0 came out in june 1994, written by a 22-year-old new zealand-born developer named steve outtrim who was living in melbourne. he had built it for himself first since the html editor category basically did not exist yet (hotmetal pro was the closest commercial product, with mosaic and a few text editors doing the rest). hotdog hit the shareware download circuit at the moment the web was just becoming something ordinary people wanted to build pages for. outtrim went from a one-person shareware operation to founding sausage software in 1995 with a few staff in a melbourne office that became locally famous for the pool table and the pinball machines in reception.

sausage software ran hard through '96 and '97. the company hit 250,000 hits per day on sausage.com in '96, which was a big number for a software vendor's website in that period. hotdog went through versions 2 and 3 and pro 4 with a feature curve aimed at people building actual web pages rather than at the wysiwyg market. the editor stayed in source view as its primary mode even after frontpage and dreamweaver pushed visual editing as the default. that source-first identity was hotdog's character throughout its life, with the editor's audience being the people who wanted to learn html rather than the people who wanted to avoid learning it.

the late '90s ipo wave caught sausage. the company listed on the australian stock exchange in '99 and outtrim became one of the local dotcom millionaires that the australian financial press loved to write about. the underlying business never quite scaled past the shareware-author profile though. dreamweaver had appeared in '97 and was eating the professional market. frontpage was bundled with microsoft office and absorbed the casual market. by '00 hotdog was profitable but stuck, and outtrim's solution was to sell out into a merger with sms management and technology in 2000. the hotdog product rights ended up with a new entity that kept the sausage software name without keeping any of the original staff. that new entity shipped a hotdog professional 7 line through the early '00s, then the 7.02 update on august 24 2003 was the last release. the brand sat dormant after that.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it was ~

hotdog's interface had a particular look that the early-shareware crowd remembered. the toolbar was dense with html-tag buttons that inserted the tags around the selection. the editing pane was a text view with color coding for tags and attributes. a preview pane could be pulled out to see the rendered output, with no proper wysiwyg editing in place until much later versions tried (clumsily) to add it. the program assumed you were learning html as you went, which lined up perfectly with the '95 and '96 audience of hobbyists building their first geocities or angelfire pages.

the shareware distribution model was the other defining piece. hotdog got onto every cover-disk pc magazine through '95 and '96, plus the early shareware sites like tucows and download.com. the registration fee was small (around 100 us dollars at the high end, less for the basic version) and the unregistered version had a nag screen rather than crippled functionality. that was the right shape for the audience, since people building their first homepage in '96 mostly paid the fee after a few weeks because the program actually worked.

~ the unraveling ~

dreamweaver was the structural problem. macromedia shipped dreamweaver 1.0 in '97 with a serious visual-editing engine and a roundtrip html mode that did not mangle the source. by '99 dreamweaver was the standard professional tool, with hotdog stuck in the "shareware editor for the hobby market" slot. frontpage was the other problem since it shipped with office in '97, which gave it free distribution to every corporate desktop that bought office. hotdog was a paid shareware download competing against a free office-bundled product on one side and a respected professional tool on the other.

the company-internal problem was the dotcom-millionaire angle. the asx listing in '99 made outtrim and his early staff rich on paper, but the share price was tied to the same dotcom bubble that was about to deflate. the merger with sms in 2000 was a soft exit before the bubble fully popped. outtrim moved on to other ventures. the new owners kept the sausage software name and the hotdog product but did not have the same connection to the shareware audience, and the product lost the cultural slot it had filled.

~ what it left ~

hotdog's final release in august 2003 was a quiet end to a noisy product. version 7.02 ran on windows 2000 and xp with css 2.1 and javascript editing support, and had absorbed some of the wysiwyg ideas dreamweaver had popularized. the audience that would have bought it in '96 was now on dreamweaver if they were professional or on frontpage if they were not, with a smaller share moving to the new php-friendly editors like phpedit or to plain emacs and vim for the unix-leaning crowd. hotdog's market was gone.

what hotdog left was a particular kind of memory in people who built their first web pages on dialup in '95 or '96. the program was specifically australian in its origin (the pool table in reception, the slightly knockabout marketing of a melbourne shareware author who became an asx millionaire), with that part being unusual for a software brand of the era. outtrim wrote a memoir about the experience in 2007, which is the closest thing the product has to a dedicated history. the shareware-html-editor category itself died with hotdog. the era that needed a friendly tool to learn html on a 56k connection has not come back.

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