Re: DW, FP and Access Databases

Front page and Dreamweaver are different things, intended for different 
purposes.  Your partner's statement is akin to the statement:

"My Mack Truck is better than your Hummer 4WD."

Well it all depends on what you want it to do.  Perhaps the Mack is better 
than the Hummer, perhaps not.

Frontpage was intended to be an all-in-one web site building, design and 
deployment system for people that don't know diddley about web sites.   
Dreamweaver is a professional-grade fully configurable web publishing tool, 
to be used in conjunction with other tools such as graphics tools to build 
web sites.

In order to be an all-in-one system, Front Page makes some compromises.  
Amongst them, Microsoft takes total control of your site structure, leaving 
you little say.

This represents (at least in FP98 and earlier - not sure if they've fixed it 
in FP2000) a gigantic security hole.  If you know the site is a FP site (and 
every page has a helpful MS advertisement in the Meta tags) then you'll also 
know there's a folder called http://your.domain.com/_vti_/  containing links 
to all kinds of files inside your site.  Including all your passwords.

You can't prevent FP putting that folder there.  You can't rename it or FP 
doesnt work.  If you do rename it, FP makes a new one.

By all means use FP for database accesses, if you dont mind users having 
access to your data and being able to make whatever changes they like.

Use FrontPage if you're happy that anyone using Netscape will get errors all 
through the place.  And if any javascript (FP calls these bots I believe) 
fails then Microsoft's reaction will be "well tell your users they ought to 
use a proper browser like IE5".  (Yes this actually happened to me!)

If your partner insists on using FrontPage, then make sure they NEVER EVER 
UNDER PAIN OF DEATH use anything with "bot" in it's name.  You'll have 
enough problem with invalid tags, invalidly nested tags, multiple redundant 
tags  (such as <font size="1"><font color="black"><font size="2"><font 
size="1"> ) and totally uncontrollable layout, without having to wrestle 
with bots that require FP extensions on your host server, and/or offer 
security hole invitations to hackers to offer their creative skills to your 
site, and/or things that just don't bloody work!

Then FP will alter any code you write yourself to conform with what it's 
weird idea of good code is.

But other than that it's quite good.

Another point ... there's no serious web site builder I know, who's built 
more than one site, who uses FP.  I used it originally when I started out, 
and when I look back at what I created with it, I simply cringe.  What a 
mess.

By comparison ...  in this neck of the woods,  ALL the professional web 
developers (as distinct from people charging money for building web sites - 
that's not the same thing) are using Dreamweaver.

Read into that what you will.

Cheers,
Mike Kear
AFP Web Development
Windsor, NSW, Australia
http://www.afp.zip.com.au



>From: Kevin Dail <kddm(at)worldnet.att.net>
>To: hwg-techniques(at)hwg.org
>Subject: DW, FP and Access Databases
>Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2000 21:31:19 -0500
>
>My partner uses FrontPage and I use DW.  I am trying to convince her
>that DW is for us. She has just seen some info on FrontPage 2000 and
>she wants to know if DW can handle Access data bases...
>
>She says...
>"...you can, indeed, upload an Access database to the site and
>connect directly to it via FrontPage ... without needing to make any
>outside server settings.
>...if this does prove to be true ... it would be of great benefit to
>us and would give FrontPage a definite advantage. I'm not sure if
>Dream Weaver has this capability ... you might want to check it out."
>
>So I ask the experts, can DW do this? I do not understand FP
>extensions at all. Can you do something similar with DW?
>
>
>Best Regards,
>
>Kevin John Dail
>Art Director, Web Illuminators Inc.,
>Web Design, Graphics and Business Solutions
>kdail(at)webilluminators.com
>http://www.webilluminators.com
>Profesor MacDaills Trivia Challenge
>at http://home.att.net/~ProfTrivia

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