MS Front Page

[JQ Johnson]

jrervin at uncg.edu writes:
> I would like to solicit feedback from folks who use MS Front Page 98 to 
> help manage a web site. Is it as good as the reviewers claim?

I evaluated FP 98 and used it heavily for a couple of weeks, but based on
the evaluation concluded that we did NOT want to deploy it widely here at UO
Library.  We purchased a volume license for Claris (now Filemaker) Home Page
instead.  The major problems with FP 98 are that it ties you too closely to
Microsoft products.  For example:

   - it requires that you run the MS personal web server on your development
machine.  That's fine for me, but our Systems group shuddered at the thought
of having dozens of our reference librarians doing so.
    - it essentially requires that you run the MS Server Extensions on your
publishing web server, and works much better if that server just happens to
be IIS on NT.
   - it generates HTML code that displays properly only on a Windows
machine.  For example, it routinely replaces entities like "©" with the
corresponding Windows 8-bit characters.  If you change the font on a region
of a web page, it makes it very hard to set the font to anything other than
one of the fonts you have installed on your development machine (which may
not be the same as those you expect to be installed on your viewers'
machines); for example, it is very hard to set the font face to include one
of the official generic fonts [for instance, I always use
FACE="Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif"; I'm personally more of a Mac user than a
windows user, so I tend to harp on cross platform page compatibility.].
    - many of the fancy effects you can achieve depend on MSIE 4.0.  Unlike
Susan Persak, I found that many of the effects I might want to produce with
FP 98 did not display right in Navigator 3, or even Navigator 4, much less
Opera.
   - it makes it very hard to mix and match tools in developing your web
site.  It's even hard to use a text editor to edit the raw HTML, since FP 98
puts in so much extra garbage.  I don't use a text editor to edit HTML much
any more, but I *do* use a variety of tools including perl scripts and a
bevy of different wysiwyg editors; in a typical site jointly maintained by
lots of people, it's even more likely that you won't have everyone using FP
98 all the time.
   - its site management features are excellent for managing a site
installed on your personal machine, but rather weaker for managing a site as
it is published on a different web server.

FP 98 is very powerful for the price, and an excellent choice if (a) a
single person is managing the web site AND (b) the expected viewing audience
will all be using Windows and MSIE 4.0.  That's more typical on the small
corporate intranet than in a library public service setting.

My experience is that trade press reviewers are biased towards long
editing-feature checklists and towards first impressions.  And many of them
(depending on the particular rag) are biased towards corporate intranet
environments.

JQ Johnson                      office: 115F Knight Library
Academic Education Coordinator  e-mail: jqj at darkwing.uoregon.edu
1299 University of Oregon       voice: 1-541-346-1746
Eugene, OR  97403-1299          fax: 1-541-346-3485