Software Review: Microsoft FrontPage98
By Scott Clark
When I first created a Web page, it was manually coded using a very sophisticated HTML code editor—the standard Windows Notepad application. I could see the code, and after making a change, I would save the file, and look at it with my trusty NCSA Mosaic Web browser. If I wanted to get slick and use some new HTML tags, I would have to use the new Netscape Navigator 1.0.
About that time, Microsoft announced that they had a "plug-in" product for Microsoft Word which would let a person use the familiar word processor graphic interface, complete with point and click styling, centering, highlighting, etc. A would-be developer could just highlight the text that they wished to become an H1 tag, and click the H1 button, and, viola, the tag was automatically coded by Word’s Internet Assistant, as it was called.
"I felt bound up by the user interface, not freed by it."
I tried it for a while, and decided that although it may be an assistant for someone that’s locked into using Word, for myself it was like creating a Web page in the dark while wearing dark sunglasses. I felt bound up by the user interface, not freed by it. I preferred to work in the world of HTML code, greater-than signs and less-than signs pointing me from bit to byte.
Soon I found a little tool called
HTMLNotepad—sort of a Notepad on steroids. It wasn’t WYSIWYG, and looks a little like my original HTML tool, Notepad. The difference is all the shortcut keys for each of the HTML tags. I found that it loaded extremely fast, would allow me to have multiple instances of itself open, and allowed me to still work in the code and wallow in the backslashes. And that’s pretty much the type of editor I’ve used since, although sometimes I use the Unix PICO editor, or any other basic text editor that’s handy.
Until last month, that is. I’d read the press releases about FrontPage98 like everyone else, and I figured, what the heck, it’s not that large of a download…only 20 MEGABYTES! Ah well, it was Saturday, and I had gardening to do anyway, so I downloaded it. By the time I’d finished transplanting and had taken a shower, it was on my hard drive and ready to install. Later I found that the reason it is so large is because there’s just so much to it—the Microsoft Personal Web Server, the Image Composer and GIF Animator, the FrontPage Editor and the FrontPage98 Manager—it’s a full featured package. In this beta release, documentation was limited to the online help system. The Help system contains the most basic information, but doesn’t cover much more than that.
Figure 1. The WYSIWYG FrontPage Editor
The FrontPage Manager includes its own HTTP server—the Microsoft Personal Web Server (which starts when you execute FrontPage98), for you to test your Web pages and applications on. And the FrontPage Editor finally has what I’d been waiting for all this time—a tabbed interface, in which the first tab gives you a WYSIWYG look at the page you’re working on, the next lets you manually edit the HTML code, and the last lets you see the page in an actual browser window (See figure 1). Changes which are made to the code manually are automatically reflected in the WYSIWYG tab’s display, and vice versa. Dragging the edge of a table in the WYSIWYG display visually changes the size and shape of a table on the page, and the code is automatically changed in the manual edit page. This is a slick product.
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