Between the Spaces

Google released a new product on February 23rd, 2006 called Google Pages. This new service allows even the worst of the Internet-declined of us to create a good-looking web page. Yes, it’s just as it sounds, the service does what a heck of a lot of other services have done in the past including AOL’sGeocities, and Lycos’ Angelfire as well as a few others. Even MSN got in on this market with MSN Spaces, giving users less control over the way the page looks than the others - nevertheless an interesting service.

If you’re interested in what the services actually look like when in use, I created a few pages to give you an idea so you don’t have to:

• MSN Spaces
• Google Pages

A few points on each of these… MSN Spaces seems to be more like a personal portal whereas Google Pages is more a Web page generator intended for creating pages which will be viewable by anyone. This is not to say that one is not able to display information to visitors as a normal Web page using MSN Spaces. In fact, once has the ability to set the permissions for the created MSN Space, granting either Private (Only the people you select can see your space), Messenger (only your MSN Messenger contacts can see your space) or Public (anyone on the Internet can see your space) access.

Google Pages does have it’s share of bugs, reminding me of Microsoft Frontpage’s shortcomings. Being a coder, I could not help but to stray into the “Edit HTML” section a time or two. An example was the side bar used for navigation. Changing this originally p (paragraph) tagged set of links into an ul (unordered list) for better CSS control.

My lovely code started out as a simple list, intentions for the li tags.

When saved and reaccessed, the HTML code was missing an entire caridge return between the first ul and li (which were now on the same line) and other random variations including a fresh font tag set with a blank space in it specifying size=”4″.  I had not even changed anything in the WYSIWYG mode!! It just made some changes needlessly! I suppose there is a flaw with ever editor like this, but that seems to just be moving backwards.

I think that if you’re interested in making Google Pages your home page editor, you might want to make sure that it will only be for non-professional purposes - at least for now.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 27th, 2006 at 10:31 am and is filed under Code, Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.