Hot Dog Pro 3 in One Word: Sensational

   The program many of us consider to be the finest Web authoring tool is out with a new release and it will absolutely blow your socks off.
   Hot Dog Professional 3.0 has so many new features that it would take a book to describe them and even their web site doesn't have a chance to go into detail about them all. For instance, you press ALT-RETURN to get a <p> tag right from the keyboard and SHIFT-RETURN for a <br> tag. The thing is, this saves you
so much time all by itself that it is, indeed worth of mention up front. Similarly, CONTROL-B gives you your bold text tags and CONTROL-I gives you italic text tags. There are others, and you can customize nearly anything you want! This keeps your hands off the mouse as much as possible and on the keyboard.
   But better than that, you can now define your own tags! If you notice in the paragraph above that we show you the <p> symbol in the body of this text. You cannot type in those symbols because they are used in HTML to denote tags. But we just defined them as a custom tag, called it "Fake <>" and then just go apply
the tag. You can also make a button on any of many customizable toolbars, set up a keyboard shortcut and the like. The point here is that Hot Dog Pro 3 is tremendously customizable. And when you want to be sure what you typed in is right, a simple click with the mouse will bring up a view of your page as you go. As
an alternative, ALT-R will also switch to the page view and ALT-H will bring you back to the editing window. This is slick.
   You can infer from the above that you can check out your page at any time you want, just by changing views to a "ROVER" screen. ROVER is a preview which can be set to Netscape or Internet Explorer. You can switch between them if you wish to view the different "flavors" of your document.
   Well, we've come this far and have not even mentioned the really "killer features" in Hot Dog Pro 3.0. Everyone is going to have their favorites, or "favs" as the Aussies who wrote this program call them, but mine are:

     Sniffer
   The Sniffer resides on the side of your screen and offers a complete outline of the files you have in any directory, the components of the particular web page you are working on (and whether the links are valid), a list of favorite tags, URL's and so on and WWW sites.
   The nice thing about this is you can drag and drop things from the Sniffer to your main document and there it is. Use the file list in Sniffer to show all the graphic images in any directory, click on the sucker in the Sniffer and then just drag it to where you want it to appear in your document. Tan-Fas-Tik! Yes, Dot Dog Pro 3.0 still has every one of the dialogs which allow you custom control of every aspect of any item you want to insert, but when push comes to shove and you don't need all that control, just drag-and-drop away.

     Snaglets
   Sausage Software is also famous for a great collection of smaller applications which can really spice up web pages. They call them "snaglets" and Hot Dog Pro includes four of the best onces in its own package. These include:

•   Frames: With this little goodie, you can frame to your heart's content. The frames are constructed visually, like Sausage's Frame Gang, and the code just drops in to the document you are writing. Frames are a great technology, if not over-used, and can make finding things on a site very much easier.
     What is not directly supported are frames embedded in frames. If you want to do that, take a few minutes to see how to construct this in any good HTML reference. Basically, you nest frames.
   
•    Animator: Everyone loves this! It requires Java class files, but the files come with Hot Dog Pro 3.0. You do have to upload them to your web site for it to work. But if you've wished you could animate images on your web site, now you can. And, except for the drawing stuff, it is easy to do (I can't   draw).
   
•    Text Effects: Jiggling text. Incredible Shrinking Text. Moving Text. All sorts of things. This Java class files-required snaglet can really liven up your page! They are funnnnn and, fortunately, not obtrusive like awful blinking text!
   
•    Client Side Image Maps: "Client side" means this is done without having to deal with special files which may reside on your server, usually in a "cgi" directory, somewhere. We all know what these image maps are, you click on a certain area of a graphic and make the link to some other location.
     This will really spice up your web site. Just be sure you don't take forever loading the image map. And to help you . . . there is Hot Dog Pro 3.0's Bandwidth Buster, which is part of the program and analyzes the total amount of stuff in your page and makes changes or recommendations to show         how to make surfers' downloading your page quicker.

     Style Sheets
   This is probably the biggest single innovation to Hot Dog Pro 3.0. We've all used style sheets to a greater or lesser degree in other programs such as word processors. But now this absolute power comes to HTML documents and it is a major innovation you will want to use if you do a lot of writing and designing for the web.
     One of the amazing things style sheets do is allow you to set up all sorts of attributes, for text or containers, and then just make them work. If you are used to spending some time changing different things on different paragraphs, worry no more. Style sheets are the answer. It will take a little work to get used to style sheets, but once you do, things will go along very much faster for you.

   Right Mouse Support
   There is extensive support for the right mouse button. And, in addition, you can customize the things you can get a hold of from that button. This is very, very good when you have some sort of certain style that you use – for instance, I like to use these long dashes in my writing, called em dashes. They are accessed through the right mouse menu.

     Auto Everything
   We really cannot say enough about the ability of Hot Dog Pro 3.0 to make creating web pages easy. Want a link to a favorite site? Just drag the site from the Sniffer. Want to set up an E-Mail reply link? Just click on a button. Want to do complicated formatting of a link? All the options are just a click away. This program does it all!
  
   Some of the other things which are possible with Hot Dog Pro 3.0 include building forms on your web page, appending information to the clip board rather than just replacing what happens to be on it at the time, customizing horizontal lines, labeling images with text, setting colors any way you wish to and creating metatags to help search spiders find your pages. Frankly, the list goes on and on.
   You can try Hot Dog Pro 3.0 out for 30 days for free. Its worth the download time because if you want to do any web authoring, this great program has all the options. It even includes a wizard to construct certain types of pages for you.
                                                                    
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