Microsoft FrontPage is the Web design tool that "serious" developers love to hate. While some of that is knee-jerk anti-Microsoftism, FrontPage 98 earned whipping boy status with nasty code mangling and bloat, IE-only compliance and dependence on proprietary FrontPage server extensions. Whatever was saved using it as a handy visual design tool was lost in the agony of cleaning up after it. In other words, it sucked boulders.
December 23, 1999
But Microsoft was never really targeting the pros. Instead, they aimed at their natural market - the casual user who wanted to painlessly throw up a personal Web site, the harried small business owner, the corporate Intranet author.
With FrontPage 2000, Microsoft has tried to address the concerns of serious developers while retaining and expanding their core audience. And this release is significantly better all around - the bone-headed code bloat is gone, there's far less dependence on FrontPage server extensions, and the odious FrontPage Web Server (you had to install it on your hard drive) is history.
At the same time, they've grasped their business users even more firmly by the cojones - tightly integrating (and bundling) FP2000 into their Office 2000 suite (Word, Excel, Access). In this context, FP2000 has emerged as a likely and useful tool to produce decent Web pages from Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and Access databases, the lingua franca of most corporate business users and intranet authors.
The Word-like interface is straightforward and easy to use. The "normal" mode is your basic visual editor: input and format text, insert tables, images, and other objects, move stuff around the screen, etc. You can switch to a nicely color-coded HTML edit screen at will and actively edit your code (and it won't be mangled on the round-trip). You can preview output in a native browser view. If you're working on a Web site you can bring up a file and folder organizer, a navigation map editor and display, a list of hyperlinks. You can also generate a variety of reports (broken links, unlinked files, recently changed files, site summaries, slow pages, etc.). A "tasks" view provides basic project management capabilities.
Page design and formatting is also (surprise) very Word-like. You work with toolbar buttons and drop-down menus. There are standard Microsoft "wizards" for creating and modifying tables, style sheets and adding some DHTML scripts to your pages, and a hex color-picker. The package includes 60 basic "themes" - templates which may be useful for the average Joe but which most designers will laugh at (one good point, however, is that they are modifiable). There are also some rudimentary tools for cropping, beveling, resampling or color-adjusting already-embedded images.
FP2000 will now adapt to your personal coding style - you can enter your code formatting preferences and FP will "learn" from them. Other improvements include global search and replace, unlimited nested sub-sites, and cross-platform JavaScript compliance/testing. You can test-target different browser versions as well, not just IE. FP2000 comes with a pre-built collection of objects like search engine modules and database collection forms. Finally, you can employ some on-board Visual Basic to create custom toolbar buttons, macros and page manipulation routines.
As mentioned earlier, FP2000 is tightly bound (with XML) to the Office 2000 environment and is designed to work seamlessly with RichText-filled Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and Access databases. You can import multiple Word documents, for example, as an entire linked Web site or sub-site - the Word formatting will be translated relatively painlessly to HTML (massively improved from the ghastly Word-native "save-as-HTML" options of earlier years). You can pull data from Access (or any ODBC-compliant database) or Excel spreadsheets easily and go full roundtrip between them - for example, updating databases from a Web page (caveat: you'll still need FP server extensions to make this happen).
In the end, FP2000 is a significantly improved product that actually approaches usability for the professional Web developer, although those who want to use a visual design tool will probably keep flocking to Macromedia DreamWeaver. It squarely hits the mark, however, with the business and Intranet development crowd. Here it's a huge step up in both usability and utility. In either case, Microsoft no longer need hang its head in shame: the horrors of FrontPage 98 are no more.
