Was iWeb released too soon?

Question

I'm wondering if iWeb was released before it was ready, as there seem to be be few very obvious bugs and major failings
For example iWeb does not use the full range of HTML character entities which causes some web servers to serve up some very strange objects on pages if you use apostrophes or similar punctuation.
For examples look here: http://tinyurl.com/9xh98
And here: http://tinyurl.com/cav2k
I've also discovered that iWeb cannot copy pages. For example you spend a fair bit of time laying out a page and getting the formatting just right, and then you discover you can't duplicate it, copy it, or do a save as. So for your next web page you have to start all over again.
Publishing with FTP is next to useless because you can't upload only the changed files. For example if I make a minor change to one page and then save the changes using publish to a folder, iWeb then re-writes almost the entire web site to your local folder. Then when I use an FTP client like Transmit to synchronize with the remote site, Transmit has to upload almost the entire site because every local file has overwritten. Not a good thing to do with a 50 or 100MB web site.
As a web publishing application, iWeb seems crude, very limited, and not ready for inclusion in a major suite of applications like iLife.

Answer 1

For example iWeb does not use the full range of HTML
character entities which causes some web servers to
serve up some very strange objects on pages if you
use apostrophes or similar punctuation.
For examples look here: http://tinyurl.com/9xh98
And here: http://tinyurl.com/cav2k
If you switch your browser to UTF-8, you will see that these pages are displayed correctly. This presumably means that the server you are using forces all browsers into Latin-1. This is wrong, web servers should let the page code (UTF-8 for all iWeb pages) determine what the browser does, and not force everyone to use ascii character entity codes for the hundred thousand characters not in Latin-1. You might want to ask the folks who run that server to change this.
You could argue that iWeb should allow users to choose their own encoding, like more sophisticated programs do, but it is a lot easier for most to not need to deal with the question.
The current apparent inability to easily make custom templates is obviously a shortcoming, but hardly a reason to delay issuing the program, at least in my view.