My first attempts to use Contribute to edit my own hand-coded XHTML 1 Strict
web pages were an utter nightmare, and I posted angrily to this forum that I
felt cheated by Adobe. Having persuaded my Ski Club to buy this software so
they could make minor updates I felt I had to persist with it, so, in the
complete absence of any documentation, I made my own experiments on the code to
try to see how Contribute was operating. The following points my be of interest
to others. Adobe should include them in its future documentation.

1. Contribute's inbuilt editor is absolutely NOT WYSIWYG. When I first clicked
edit on a page with CSS-specified paragraph characteristics I was appalled to
see it these characteristics disintigrate before my eyes. It turns out,
however, that when one publishes, the styles are restored. I didn't realize
this initially because I tried to rescue the page and then scrapped the draft.
No doubt others have done likewise. It was only because I wanted to look at the
source to analyse what Contribute had done to the page that I discovered the
rendering in the editor was the problem. Why isn't this documented?

2. Initially when I tried to copy and paste a small section of a page (a h2
header followed by a para in a div) I found it impossible. A red line appeared
around the area I was working on, but either I couldn't manipulate it or if I
did everything suddenly changed to the style of the h2. As a trial I replaced
the <div>s by <p>s (a bit of a pain because I had to redefine the <p>s in my
css style sheet) and then tried to do the copy and pasting. Now it was ok. So
Contribute seems to assume <div>s represent major page divisions which cannot
be manipulated. Or perhaps not - we don't know because although we paid our
money and don't get a printed manual any more it isn't in the pdf manual.

I appreciate that Contribute is used by amateurs who know little or nothing
about HTML, CSS and page validation and want to create blogs or web pages with
a word processor. Good luck to them. But its main claim is to allow management
of content created separately, (eg with Dreamweaver). In that case, one needs
to know how to edit such content. There are other points I haven't explored,
for example. What happens if someone introduces a carriage return? Does this
produce a <br>, a new <p></p> or what. Can one have control over this? One's
CSS styles seem to appear in one of the menus. How does one create a new
section to use them? I think we should be told.