Is Microsoft’s FrontPage really
a Tool for a Serious Developer?.
Many of the old school web developers grew up using the like of Notepad or other
simple text editors to create their web pages. They would remember all the tags
and manually code them in where they were needed. They still do this today.
There is nothing wrong with it, either. Raw coding in this way is the best way
to maintain complete control over what the resulting site does and is certainly
the way to garner the deepest understanding of the mechanisms at work. Many of
these hard core guys look down on products such as FrontPage as being OK for
lesser mortals, but not really something for real web developers. I would
like to take a closer look into it to see what kind of things it can do, what it
doesnt do too well and to blow some of the myths about the product.
By way of housekeeping the
version I am using for reference is the current 2002 version that was in a
bundle entitled Microsoft Office XP Professional with FrontPage, to which I
have applied Service Pack 2. The Help/About shows the version as
(10.4128.4219) SP-2. When I reference earlier versions, I mean those prior
to FrontPage 2000. The 2000 and 2002 versions are substantially similar;
earlier versions were somewhat different. This article is not intended to be
a full review of the product, but rather a look at some of its feature set to help
you decide if it could be a useful addition to your toolbox. Please note also
that while some common parlance uses "Framed" pages, Microsoft uses "Frames" page in
FrontPage. I am continuing in this article with the Microsoft version.
FrontPage can be used as both
a page editor and as a website manager. When you start FrontPage you will
notice that the File menu includes both Open and Open Web. When you Open,
you open a file, probably a web page file, you are editing that page. When you
Open Web you open a website. The website you open could be either local,
using for example either Personal Web Server or IIS (on XP), or it could be on a
hosting server somewhere. Either way, the site will need to have the FrontPage
Server Extensions loaded in order to open the site. Its of interest to note
that if you Open Web a site on a hosting server, you will be making changes in
real time to the live site. Click save and the change is live! If you want
to update a set of pages at once, you could create a copy of the set in a new
folder, and when all changes are complete, move/copy them to overwrite the
originals. Alternatively, you could edit a local copy and then publish the
updates to the live server. Earlier versions of FrontPage had the site
management (the FrontPage Explorer and page editing FrontPage Editor
separated as two distinct programs. Since they have been integrated into a
singular view of the toolset, it is a lot clearer and easier to understand the
relationships between individual features.
When a site is opened as a
website, FrontPages very useful website management features come into play. If
you click View/Folder list you will see an Explorer style view of the folder
hierarchy of your site. Clicking Folders in the Views bar provides full
file management capabilities.
Reports in the same bar
provides a wealth of conveniences including Unlinked Files, Hyperlinks,
External Hyperlinks, Component Errors and more. Some of these features open up
further capabilities as you use them. The Reports part of FrontPages feature
set is so often underutilized, which is a shame because it is a rich toolset.
Navigation is involved in
FrontPages automated site navigation capability. When this capability is used,
it is possible to automatically generate navigation bars on the pages in your
site. Though I have on occasions used this feature, it is not one of my
favorites because I feel that I lose a measure of control. I prefer to manually
generate the site navigation that I would like to have.
Hyperlinks is a dynamite
tool! Click on this to reveal its window and then select any file or folder in
your site to see the functioning links into and out of the item.
When you select the Page
view, you are looking at the page editor. Open up a page (this is also how the
program looks if you use it to open a page file instead of opening up a website)
and you see three or more tabs. The three are labeled Normal, HTML, and
Preview. There are more if your page is a frames page. Frames pages open
with each of the contained pages open in its frame. The additional tabs provide
a view of the frames page HTML and the code for non-frames capable browsers.
The three principal tabs are the most important for my purposes here.
