We tested version 1.0 on both the Macintosh and Windows 95 platforms. Fusion works much like a page-layout program, allowing you to position text blocks and images (and almost anything else, for that matter) on a pasteboard grid. This is enormously impressive—no other Web authoring program offers this degree of design control.

Unfortunately, Fusion's precision proves illusory under real-world conditions. The program handles external HTML files awkwardly, to the extent it can be said to handle them at all, and the complex code Fusion generates is difficult to access and edit. There are some cross-platform anomalies, as well. For example, this Fusion sample page, built with the Windows 95 version (and using a modified banner from "Downtown," one of some 50 site styles that ship with the product), employs a very straightforward layout. Yet Fusion's HTML output produced a superfluous block of white space on the Mac—we had to "get under the hood" and manually strip out an excess table in order to achieve the correct layout on both platforms.

In fairness, it needs to be pointed out that Fusion is not designed to be used like a stand-alone tool such as PageMill. Instead, the program utilizes a tightly integrated, site-oriented approach throughout—an approach which has definite strengths, as well as weaknesses. Fusion can access external databases or create its own; site-wide updates are easy to perform, and alternative versions of a site are easily created. For that matter, Fusion can upload and/or publish your site with a single button click.

The downside, though, is that Fusion's tight integration makes it harder to fix any of the inevitable problems that occur during the construction of a large Web site. Version 2.0, currently in beta for Windows 95, promises to make Fusion easier to use with existing files and other Web creation tools. If NetObjects can succeed in opening the program up, then Fusion's combination of precision and power will make it truly indispensable.

(Reviewed February 21, 1997)