Macromedia HomeSite

» see macromedia.com/software/homesite as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

around 2003-2005 the html-editor question in turkey was always the same pair of names. dreamweaver. or homesite. by then i was at university in ankara doing computer engineering and the way you wrote a webpage was either you opened dreamweaver and dragged things around, or you opened homesite and typed angle brackets. i was a typer.

this happened mostly in the english-speaking internet, but homesite was a strange product even there. nick bradbury wrote the first version in september 1996 in north carolina, as a side project, in borland delphi. delphi was an unusual choice for windows software at the time. most windows software was c++. delphi was the pascal-descended environment that produced compact native binaries from one developer's machine. bradbury was working alone.

the html editor market in '96 was already crowded. microsoft frontpage shipped that year as the redmond wysiwyg pick. adobe pagemill came from the macromind side. on the mac, claris home page covered the same ground. sausage software's hot dog was the australian entry. dreamweaver had not arrived yet. homesite did not try to compete on wysiwyg. it was a code editor that knew html, with a tag-completion engine, a project tree view, and a preview pane you could turn off when you wanted to see source only. for the people writing layouts by hand and trying to learn what each tag actually rendered as, it was the tool that did not get in the way.

allaire bought homesite in 1997. allaire was the boston coldfusion company, then the leading server-side dynamic-page environment before php overtook it. they bundled homesite into coldfusion studio as the editor half of the product and kept selling the standalone too. for a stretch from '98 through '01, homesite was the keyboard-oriented option in a market where every other editor was racing toward visual layout tools. that gap was where the product made sense.

macromedia bought allaire in march '01 and got homesite as part of the deal alongside coldfusion. macromedia already had dreamweaver as its wysiwyg flagship. so for the first time the two competing products were in the same catalog. macromedia did not retire either. they kept homesite as the lower-priced code-only option, sold homesite+ alongside dreamweaver mx, and held the brand alive through versions 4.5 and 5.1 and 5.5 until '05.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

homesite's developer experience in the late '90s was unusual for windows software of its size. tag completion that knew the html spec, plus a tag inspector that knew which attributes were valid for which element. project-wide find and replace worked across files, and the integrated ftp upload behaved the way you expected. in '99 there was no equivalent on linux with the same html-specific intelligence at the same price. vi and emacs were doing it but with no html-specific knowledge built in. for the windows web-shop world in '99 and 2000, homesite was a real piece of software that one guy in north carolina had started.

i used it around '03-'05 on whichever windows machine was in front of me at university. ttnet broadband finally reached my apartment around '06 (the dialup years were behind me by then). the workflow was open homesite, type angle brackets, save, alt-tab to whichever browser was on screen, refresh. for the static pages that turkish university coursework expected (a personal page or a hardware-list signature for frmtr), homesite was the right amount of tool. nothing fancy. just an editor that knew what html was.

~ the decline ~

the cracks were two. one was that wysiwyg was winning the broader market. dreamweaver had made the visual-design metaphor work well enough that an art director could lay out a page without seeing the source. for shops where designers and developers were different people, that was the thing that mattered. homesite stayed on the developer side of the divide while the money moved to the designer side.

the other crack was browser-based web work. by '05 the world had moved to applications that ran in browsers, with javascript and ajax in the foreground and html as the substrate. the static-page tool category was shrinking. editors like eclipse and visual studio added html support, and the open-source side started shipping notepad++ and later sublime. homesite, locked to windows and to the static-html worldview of '96, looked older every year.

~ the long tail ~

adobe bought macromedia in december '05. the catalog consolidation took a couple of years. dreamweaver survived because it was the visible flagship. homesite quietly stayed available as a discount-priced sku for a stretch. then on may 26 2009 adobe posted a notice that homesite had been discontinued and recommended dreamweaver as the successor for existing customers. there was no farewell event, no shutdown date with hours, just a product page that stopped existing.

nick bradbury himself had moved on years earlier. after homesite he wrote topstyle (the css editor) and feeddemon (the rss reader). both ran on the same delphi heritage and both eventually got absorbed into newsgator. the personal lineage of one developer in north carolina building windows software that web people actually wanted runs from homesite in '96 to topstyle in '98 to feeddemon in '03. each product had its decade. homesite had the longest one because allaire put it inside coldfusion studio at exactly the moment server-side scripting was taking off.

the people who used homesite in '99 and 2000 mostly moved on to dreamweaver or to a code editor that was not html-specific. the muscle memory of the tag-completion shortcuts faded. but the idea that you could write an html editor that did not try to abstract html away from you survived in the editors that came after, sublime and then vs code. they did not call it homesite-style. they had to invent it again from scratch.

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