The FrontPage Blues

FrontPage is evil. Especially scary is the number of large companies that use it simply because it's free with Office and they are under the mistaken impression that a) if people already know Word (although they don't use Word correctly either) they'll easily learn FrontPage and b) anybody can build a web site. I recently bid on a job where I was told the US government told them they HAD TO use FP because they are govt. subsidized. I told the client FP is not the tool to create Section 508 accessible sites but they had no choice. Until FP is unbundled from Office and judged on an equal purchasing basis there will always be work fixing broken, incompatible FP sites. In my opinion, the fact that MS hasn't fixed FP to write standard html is another evidence of the Microsoft/IE monopoly attempt.

My wife teaches computer class to grades 7-9 and because the computers at school have frontpage, she has to use frontpage to teach the students how to make their own websites. I would love to teach them how to make pages in textpad and then use dreamweaver or some other editor later. after they understand whta the code means, but I don't think they are able to understand the code. i just hope they do not grow up to design pages in frontpage.

When I started at my current job almost two years ago, I hadn't used front page in four years.

I was sure my days of using front page were long done and over.

Then I sat down to work on my first day.

When I opened the root of the development server, I came face to face with those horrible proprietary folders and file names I had grown to detest.

Yes. The person who was there before me, was getting paid HUGE money to build websites, and he had been doing it in Front-F***king-PAGE!

I asked my boss if there was any way we could re do the server, remove the extensions and slowly rebuild the sites using ASP and java script. She said, "No, this is easier for people to use and we have created a bunch of "webs" for certain departments to update themselves. It would be horribly tedious to train them to use dreamweaver." End of story.

Now I build my pages with Dreamweaver but am forced to use FP to upload them and to build FORMS. ugh. End of story, no arguing.

Kill me now, please.

Welcome to my world. I had thought years ago I'd never, ever see Frontpage again in my career. I was wrong. Now I deal with it every day. Our whole intranet is built on it and I don't think it's going away.
If only I had the option of fixing it.
Some day. I can only hope.

As Bobby Boucher's mom would have said: Frontpage is the devil !!
In my opinion frontpage basically does more harm than good. No doubt it's a great place to start if you have no clue on how to write html. I started out with frontpage but quickly found out that this sure wasn't the tool to use. I bought an HTML book and opened notepad. I've never used frontpage since and pray I'll never have to again. That's 4 years ago now.

FP leaves wierd code and is hard as hell to debug.

No, a clean document in BBEdit or Ultraedit is the way. No useless tags, just what is needed.

Todd, the best things about this story are that a) you restrained yourself from throwing the whole thing back in their faces and giving up, and b) you restrained yourself from describing the whole awful experience to the client at the end. I have trouble with both of those steps in projects like this! That's the kind of professionalism that even after 6 years, many web people totally lack.

Well ... for some strange reason I think I'm about to become unpopular!? I use Frontpage, and I'm quite happy with it! I really can't see what all the hype is about ... the pages that I've made in Frontpage easily run through IE, Netscape/Mozilla and Opera! I've never experienced problems with buggy code or faulty code! But then again, I don't use FP Extensions, and I don't use FP native time-stamps and forms...

Exactly!!! FrontPage is the mother of all evil. I have hated that program for years. Microsoft refuses to give into web standards, instead adopting its own shaky style guidelines that always result in bloated pages. I've become a fan of the recent Dreamweaver release, MX, which allows you to hard code a site exactly the way you want with support for validation. Microsoft fails to dominate in this category. Period.

Maybe the other designer was jailed for using FrontPage? :)

Hmm. Our intranet was done on FP as well, so I had to use it. The thing I dislike about it is not just the bulky code, but as a designer, that there seems sometimes to be no connection between cause and effect - simply inserting a graphic causes the layout to go kafluey, until you drill down through umpteen obscure menus to uncheck a box somewhere. The obvious Gap In The Market question is: why isn't there a simple, WYSIWYG web authoring program that non-coders can use that writes clean code? I rather like Softpress' Freeway, but that's because I come from DTP. (Eventually the company'll send me on DW courses...soon, I hope.) Now that Apple's hired the creator of Chimera, there is no doubt that an iBrowser is coming...and with luck, an iPage application to go with it. Please please please.

I've used FrontPage on many occasions and yeah, it really, really stinks.

But there is something to be said for familiarity. I now know exactly how FrontPage ruins things and how it departs from sanity and standard. It may be utterly bass ackwards but at least it is *consistently* bass ackwards.

This means I can write perl scripts to correct its stupidity. The script will crawl through the document root, erasing useless files, directories and, with regular expressions, replacing all the non-standard characters with HTML entities, replacing unneeded METAs and other elements, removing *all* the presentational HTML and layout tables (I only use CSS for *all* positioning on my sites.) and so on. Of course the script occasionally makes errors, but that's what version control and code rollback is for.

As such, I can use FrontPage on one of my servers at home to develop stuff and then clean up the files and directories before uploading to any live servers.

Of course if I was working on a Web development team, I really wouldn't have this option.

Others are wedded to the unique solutions they've worked out, broken though those solutions might be, and I had to learn to live with that--I'm not a boat rocker. I had to explain how my stuff worked to everyone, everytime before they freaked out about my use of regular expression scripts. I tried on several occasions and was told to not to implement my tricks even though I thought they'd save us lots of time and money.

This is one of the reasons why I decided to go independent and build small business sites on a client basis. I'm too much of a small-minded, control freak.

Indeed, frontpage is evil.

The fact is, once you master how to code by hand you can do it just as fast as a WYSIWYG editor - with the added advantage of being able to do just about anything that is required. Sure, it will take a year or two with your sleaves rolled up but trust me, in the long run you will be better off.

I learned how to code the right way, by hand using little more than notepade or homesite. Using frontpage is like someone hiring a painter to paint your portrait and he does it using a paint by numbers kit. Sure, you will get a painting. Would professional painters be aghast at the work of art you so proudly hang on your wall? You bet they would.

I once had extra work and the girl downstairs said she could design the basic site. Then I could go in and add the server side scripting and database work. She proudly whipped it up in frontpage - When I took a look at the mish-mash of code I knew life would never be the same for the next week as I feverishly redid everything in order to make deadline.

Luckily my FrontPage story is a happy one.

I worked at a Microsoft Certified Solution Provider or whatever it is they call it, and when I got there the 'Solution' was always FrontPage. Luckily the manager I worked for had an appreciation for what it was we did, and between myself and two other designer/builders we were able to convince him that FP was not the One True Way.

Having learned how to do everything by hand back in the early days, I find that a mash of Homesite, BBedit and Dreamweaver (and sometimes simply Notepad) is still the best way to go.

I heartily concur. Frontpage *IS* evil. I used to make a reasonable living out of 'fixing' FP sites, nowadays my approach is much as Todd describes: start over - it's alway's best in the long run. You people who think FP will make life easier in the long run are fooling yourselves, it won't.

oh, but Microsoft's bag of torture tricks has recently deepened considerably. I recently spent a "vacation" weekend doing a quick website for my uncle - a sculptor up in Oregon. They'd had some other relative supposedly working on the site in his spare time for months but with little to show for it. So I looked at what the guy had done and in the 40 documents supporting only 5 web pages I recognized Microsoft's "be fruitful and multiply" theory of page construction. But FrontPage documents (which I would've recognized) they were not.

A quick email exchange cleared up the mystery.

He had been building the site with .NET

!*#!??

Nearly two years ago I was hired to mark up some pages and stick them in some part of the Intranet.

That part of the Intranet was managed with... *guess what* ...F***Page.

When I explained that I would code my pages in notepad and upload them to the server without FrontPage, the girl in charge of that little corner of the Intranet said: "Yeah ok, but once you've written your stuff in notepad, how do you turn it into HTML?"

I blame FrontPage for the brainwashing.

Actually, you could have probably corrected a lot of those errors in FP 2000/2002. It has its bastard elements but if you avoid its lame attempts to do CSS and FP-specific extensions, you can actually avoid a mess of code. I'm not recommending it but for many places, the only way web pages get created is if someone has a MS-tool to do the work. Sad but true.

I love FP, I can throw stuff on the screen, mess with it, ad things I know nothing about, copy the HTML throw away 60% of it and use it.........but not on a web site!

zocker, shut up.

FP sucks. all html gereators do. BBEdit is what I use, all the way. hand coding makes life so much easier. NEVER EVER use generators for something that's going live. chances are you'll take a look at the code, if you know html, and you won't know what is what. do it by hand. it's worth the time and effort.

I've got a question. I've been put in charge of redoing our company Intranet. It'll be small at first, just this location (HQ), but it will need to grow for the whole company across the US. I really, really would like to do this without Frontpage (evil). Anyone have any tips about talking my boss into not using it (though, he's very easy-going and basically puts me in charge of what is going on), but will I also run into problems with forms, etc if I don't use it? Right now I'm using Macromedia HomeSite 5 and hand-coding, so it's all XHTML and CSS. Any tips/help would be appreciated. Thanks.

I know the difficulty of dealing with FrontPage myself. I was asked to teach a FrontPage class to some of the students here where I work. We have a liberal enough workplace that I was able to insert my opinions into the class, so much so that by the end of the class, I was simply rattling off the inferiorities of FP. One of my fellow employees sat in on the class and, because of my persuasive argument, was able to convince our boss that teaching FP to anyone who doesn't specifically asks for it would be akin to punishment.

It may not be the norm here, but I like FP and have not had a problem with it. Sure the program throws in some unnecessary codes, but if you get your site to look and work the way you want it to with it, what the big deal and why the put-down. I don't consider it a bad program at all. I also use Dreamweaver, I think it's a cool program as well. I'm presently studying Flash and also hear a lot of crap about it as well. I say to each his own. I like FP.

Yes. Yes. FrontPage is the devil. I remember using it when Win98 first came out back in the day, and even then it confused the hell out of me. Sure, maybe all I know is html, java, and css to some extent, but at least I know that itll work when I upload it and I have the satisfaction of knowing that I coded it all by myself in notepad... Just my $0.02

Seems you don't know much about web design. Have you looked at your own pages in Netscape yet? Even this comments form is only one letter wide and forces you to enter text vertically.

I have one big problem with the article. The code examples give with all the mso crap means that it was created in Word and "saved for the web". That is MS Word garbage not FrontPage garbage.

FrontPage 98 did produce a lot of garbage code of its own but that is no longer the case with either of the last 2 version. While far from perfect with a little thought to what you are doing and not using the canned themes and using external style sheets FP code can be as clean or cleaner than any other editor on the market.

I've seen hand coded sites with code as bad or even worse than some of the FP sites.

As far as standards go none of the WYSIWYG editors write standards compliant code out of the box. (Tell me an editor that does and I'll be happy to try it. I've used all of the majors at one time or another and never let a site go out without some tweaking.) Closest is Dreamweaver MX when you tell it to create XHTML but even then it puts in the xml code as the first line that triggers quirks mode in Internet Explorer.

FWIW, I teach classes in both Web Design and Web Development (primarily asp and asp.net) and I'd rather see a student turn in a site that was created in FrontPage using CSS and even webbots than one that uses frames as the portolio site of the person who wrote the original article.