Also known as a very grumpy bitchfest/review of Fusion 7.

After several weeks of running about like a beheaded fowl, I find myself with very little to do. So I’ve spent most of the day going through the drek that is Fusion 7.

When Website Pros bought the package, it seems they were determined to make as few changes as possible to it. This wouldn’t have been so bad if the program actually produced reasonable code, but of course, it doesn’t. Not even close. I still can’t get it to produce a backward and forward compatible stylesheet. It still only takes version 4 browsers into account when giving code output options.

There have been some minor improvements, but they really are minor. It’s now possible to create java based flyout menus. (The option was there before, but it was useless. It’s gotten a little better now.) You can now tweak the auto-generated navigation images with greater ease. They made the sizzle better and gave us the same leathery dry steak as we were trying to choke down before.

Not that I was expecting much else.

However - the fawning, drooling, and dare I say slavering PR Coolmaps has been giving the upgrade might lead one to think the Grail had just been discovered. Or invented. Not that the fine folks at Coolmaps are impartial. Their entire existence is based on this piece of software - they *have* to love it. Makers of, say, photoshop plugins have other graphics apps that they can work with. Coolmaps isn’t branching out into the Dreamweaver market, so if Fusion really had died a dodo’s death when NetObjects went under, they were just as screwed. So I can understand why their heads are smack in Website Pro’s laps. Doesn’t mean I have to like it.

You get the same PR at the TeamGotFusion and WebsitePros sites. Everyone just falling all over themselves letting the world know how “cutting edge” the software is. Yeah, right.

Cutting edge if it’s 1999. Maybe. Their idea of 508 accessibility? Table cells can now be designated as headers. CSS support? They now have a link to a very nice article on what CSS is and why it might be a good thing, but the program can’t produce a CSS formatted site that works in NS4 and IE5 at the same time. (It would have been too hard to *mention* the @import hack? Maybe give us some ability to implement it?)

CSS-P support even seems to have been *de*creased, but I may be mistaken about that. (I just switched to winME - I’m not willing to rule out OS glitches yet.)

Like I said, lots of sizzle, and I’m still looking for the steak.