MS Front Page

[Danny Sullivan]

>    - it requires that you run the MS personal web server on your development
> machine.

No, you can use the editor as standalone. You lose some nice feature, 
like the ability to move a page and have links automatically update, 
if you do this. You can also choose to use the FP server, which I 
found much more dependable than the MS server.

> 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.

No, you can install these if you want to interact via the editor and 
explorer modules. However, I have used the FrontPae editor standalone 
for several months and simply FTP'd files across.

> 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.].

This is dead easy. Simply select the copy, then select the font 
choice from the menu, then type in the combination you want. This 
only works in FP98.

I have a bigger problem with FP 98 using <small> and <big> as opposed 
to <font size>. This is a nightmare if you move files in from FP97 or 
from Word. Both use font size, and FrontPage 98 just slaps the small 
or big tags around these -- causing absolutely no changes.

> 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.

Yep, you should avoid these if you want to be compatible for both 
browsers.

> 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. 

Yeah, FrontPage should have been dinged big time for the fact that 
the code it generates its not compatible with the code Word 
generates. These are both Microsoft products, but they don't talk to 
each other.

It also should have been slammed for not incorporating Word's 
autoproofing features, which are excellent and helpful when dealing 
with documents impossible to spell-check easily (such as with many 
URLs listed).

cheers,
danny


-----------------------------------
Danny Sullivan 
Editor, Search Engine Watch
http://searchenginewatch.com