Re: IE to Frontpage

Yeah...

they make me use it at work...  The thing I hate about frontpage is, it's
lovely as long as you never ever leave a microsoft environment.  We have a
huge storefront which someone made part of into a web the other day to try
to work on a sites chrome. Oopsies, we had to completely overwrite the
server from tape to get it to start working again for any site, and we have
nooo idea what frontpage did to disrupt the code.  We've written huge sites,
only to have to publish on a server that didn't have frontpage and then
ended up spending as much time as we spent doing it trying to get the links
working again.

Basically, if you know that every single time you design it's going to be
for a frontpage supporting server, from scratch, always to be opened in
frontpage, and for IE users, you're fine.  But despite what Microsoft says,
it is not an industry standard.  If you ever want to resort to the tried and
true methods of ftp or fixing code in notepad, sites begin to inexplicably
quit working right (a lot of stuff requires the "publish" command to work
right, and the overhead for a server that goes with all the frontpage
extensions is pretty big).

Personally, for WYSIWYG I'd rather stick with Dreamweaver.  It's not even so
much that Dreamweaver is a  better working environment (a lot of people who
are used to Word learn Frontpage a lot faster because of that), it's because
when Dreamweaver fails it does so so much better.  I have yet to have to
spend 20 hours on a site doing something like fixing links or trying to keep
one little stylesheet thing working in a site done totally in Dreamweaver.
I have to do so regularly for sites done in Frontpage.

Anyway, your idea of stripping out the obvoiusly wrong code sorta works.  If
you never use like half of the functions in frontpage, just use it to center
stuff and such, you don't need the publish command so you can edit it in
notepad and do that (you could also just use HomeSite for that, too, from
from what I hear).  If you ever open the site in frontpage again, though, to
make a revision, the code will come back and you'll have to re-take it out
again (you can turn overwriting your code off in preferences, but that
doesn't seem to totally convince it not to overwrite your code if the site
was originally made in frontpage in the first place).  And, at some point,
if you take out or add the wrong tag, your site might just stop working in
frontpage.

Ack, sorry about the long rant.  You really should try out Dreamweaver
somday though.

Ohh, and to throw my two cents into the Netscape debate:  I use IE for the
PC & Windows all the time.  Everyone's been pretty dead on about it actually
working.  Unfortunately, the first computer I had access with was an old Mac
laptop...  Netscape died on pages with huge tables or midis, but IE died on
EVERYTHING else.  I also just switch into linux most nights when all I'm
doing is chatting and coding, where I dont' need windows for my graphics
aps.  Linux doesn't have a version of IE, so even if the version of netscape
seems even slower and more oddball than usual, that's what I have.

So don't everyone get all "only freaks don't use IE, I'll ignore netscape"
because one of these days you're going to have a client say to you "Oh,
well, back in 96 we bought a bunch of Macintoshes. Our sys admin says they
aren't cut out for running the latest IE.  Why can't you make a site that
looks good and works on our computers too?  Weren't you supposed to be a web
designer?" or even worse, get someone who knows the internet inside and out
and who just contract out to web designers the "easy stuff" like chrome and
html.


April



----- Original Message -----
From: "Trevor Lockwood" <trevor(at)author.co.uk>
To: <hwg-techniques(at)hwg.org>
Sent: Monday, October 30, 2000 3:08 AM
Subject: IE to Frontpage


> Tim
>
> I agree with your support of IE. I have huge problems with Netscape. A
long
> term critic of MS I am being converted and use many MS products. I now
have
> a copy of Frontpage 98, which seems to do everything I need - not least a
> site search engine, and the ability to link to my databases. Are there any
> strong objections to using it? I will strip out anything obviously wrong
and
> verify the code with W3 before loading to the site?
>
> Like SSI it seems to good to be true.
>
> Trevor
> http://www.author.co.uk
>
>
>
>

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