MS Front Page

[Walter W. Giesbrecht]

I have not used FP 98 heavily, but I have some experience with it; 
this experience is soemwhat different than that report by some others 
on this list. Reading some of the comments makes me think the 
authors are referring to FP 97, not FP 98. To whit:

On 29 Jan 98 at 9:51, JQ Johnson wrote:

>    - 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.

No, it doesn't -- it may require *a* web server, but not necessarily 
one from MS. I use O'Reilly's Website 1.1h, and it works just fine. 
Actually, I just tried shutting down my webserver, and FP still 
worked (at least, the editor did; that's all I'm using at the 
moment). It'll probably insist on installing PWS, but it doesn't 
force you to use it.

>     - 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.

You only need the server extensions if you plan to use any of what 
they used to call "web-bots" to automate certain functions. I use it 
only to manage (somewhat) the pages on our test server; I still use 
FTP to upload everything to our production server. The powers-that-be 
in our Library Computing department would likely be reluctant to put 
the extensions on the same server as our catalogue. 

>    - it generates HTML code that displays properly only on a Windows
> machine.  

I juts tried a few simple test pages, and also tried loading a page 
with a complex table on it. FP added nothing (except maybe things 
like closing tags that aren't *really* required, like </P> and </LI>. 
I am very careful to test my pages on a variety of browsers, and I've 
never had a problem.

> 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)

But you can always go in and hand-code the font to what you want 
afterwards.

>    - 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.  

FP *97* put in a lot of extra garbage; FP 98 doesn't do it to me at 
all. The code is very clean. The only thing I don't like is having 
all the tags in lower-case letters; I prefer having them in 
uppercase, to make them stand out a bit more when I edit the code by 
hand. The formatting of the HTML code occasionally looks a little 
odd, but there's nothing wrong with it.

> 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.  

As long as you're careful not to use any of the MSIE 4.0-specific 
features (and there aren't *that* many of them), the code you'll 
generate should be fine on other browsers. I use Netscape 4 
exclusively, and I've never been disappointed with what FP Editor has 
done.

One reason for not deploying it widely is the fact that it needs 
fairly heft hardware to make it run reasonably fast. It takes alittle 
to long to load on my office Pentium 100 to be used regularly, but at 
home (on a 266 Pentium II) it runs very nicely. Having gotten used to 
using HTML Writer, I tend not to use FP for my editor, unless I'm 
doing tables or frames. I bought FP 98n mostly for the upgraded Image 
Composer, which is a very nice image editor (especially for doing 
buttons).

Your mileage may vary, of course.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Walter W. Giesbrecht                        walterg at yorku.ca    
York University Libraries          (416) 736-5639 ext. 77551
Toronto, Ontario, Canada