Expert Opinion: Imageready vs Fireworks

In general I don't think these two programs are directly comparable. ImageReady is more of an optimization add-on to Photoshop. Fireworks is it's own graphics creation program. Photoshop and Firworks have completely different strenghts and weaknesses so I don't think they're directly comparable. So, it's not a matter of choosing one or the other in general, but more a matter of choosing which tool is best for the particular task at hand.

Or are you talking more about just the optimization aspect of them? I'm not really sure which one produces better file sizes. I would say that both generate bad HTML and you shouldn't use it anyway - at least not without a lot of alterations.

I only use Fireworks, partly because I couldn't get the trial of PS to work on my PC so never went any further with it! A lot of it is a matter of what you get used to and the Macromedia Suite all follow the same type of layouts etc so are easy to use IMO. It really depends what you want to do with them.

IMO use DW for the html (with a tweek of the code manually) and whichever graphics program purely for the images and not the html.

I guess what I'm most interested in is which program might create reasonable slices and html tables for the generated slices. If neither does a good job I can do it by hand it just takes a bit longer.

Thanks for the opinions.

I haven't used Fierworks for this purpose so I really can't comment on that. I find that ImageReady's slicing is quite handy once you get all the naming conventions the way you want them, which can be quite annoying. If you've only got a small number of images to slice, it would be easier to do them by hand. If you do decide to use IR's slicing, you could either disgard the HTML and start from scratch, or heavily rework it in your HTML editor.