(later full name '''Microsoft Office FrontPage''') was a
WYSIWYG HTML Editor and
Web Site administration tool from
Microsoft for the
Microsoft Windows line of
Operating System s. It was part of
Microsoft Office application suite from 1997 to 2003. A Macintosh version was also released in 1998. Microsoft FrontPage has since been replaced by
Microsoft Expression Web and
Sharepoint Designer , which were released in December
2006 .
One of the notable features of FrontPage is its built-in support for automated
Web Template s. The main distinction between these templates and
HTML templates generated by other products is that FrontPage templates include an automatic navigation system that creates animated buttons for pages that have been added by the user. It also creates a multi-level navigation system
On The Fly using the buttons and the structure of the web site.
As a
WYSIWYG editor, FrontPage is designed to hide the details of pages' HTML code from the user, making it possible for novices to easily create
Web Page s and
Site s.
FrontPage's initial outing under the Microsoft name came in 1996 with the release of
Windows NT 4.0 Server and its constituent
HTTPd server
Internet Information Services 2.0. Bundled on CD with the NT 4.0 Server release, FrontPage 1.1 would run under NT 4.0 (Server or Workstation) or Windows 95, and was aimed at providing server administrators with a tool to deliver rich web and intranet content in a package as easy to use as Microsoft Word.
In 2006, Microsoft announced that FrontPage would eventually be superseded by two products.
{Link without Title} Microsoft SharePoint Designer will allow business professionals to design
SharePoint -based applications.
Microsoft Expression Web is targeted for web design professionals who create full-blown web sites. Both are partially based on FrontPage. Microsoft announced that they will be discontinuing Microsoft FrontPage by December 2006.
Some features that are part of the last version of FrontPage include:
- Help navigating through your site, and seeing your file structure, visually
- Built-in features for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (partial)
- Built in image editor (MS Image Composer)
- Point-and-click functionality for common tools, like mouseovers, e-mail forms, and hit counts
- Simple to use with previous knowledge of Office products
- Integrated data display with Office products like Access and Excel
- Support for CSS-based themes (like ASP.NET Master Pages )
- When you change the URL of a page, all the links to that page are dynamically changed
- Task-assignment for team projects
- Content is editable from anywhere with FrontPage (password is needed)
- Support for rich clipboard data import (i.e. copy/pasting data from Internet Explorer into FrontPage 2003 will automatically download media resources such as images and save them locally)
Some criticism of FrontPage include:
- In previous versions, the WYSIWYG mode tended to generate non-validating HTML, resulting in pages that were optimized for Internet Explorer . However, FrontPage 2003 is capable of generating valid XHTML if the author requires it.
- In some cases, HTML that is manually changed in FrontPage's code view can revert back to incorrectly generated markup after making even slight changes in WYSIWYG mode.
- Because of the way it manages content as live resources, FrontPage is generally not well suited for administering medium to large corporate websites.
The final version of FrontPage is Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003. The company has introduced two new products to replace Frontpage called
Microsoft Expression Web and
Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer . Previous versions include:
- Vermeer FrontPage 1.0
- 1995 Microsoft FrontPage 1.1
- 1997 Microsoft FrontPage 97 (version 2)
- 1997 Microsoft FrontPage Express 2.0 (free stripped-down version came with Internet Explorer , and could be found online from numerous "download" repositories"You can find the latest version at the www.Microsoft.com Web site" in Ruth Maran et al: ''Office 97 - Superbook'', 1998, Marangraphics, ISBN 1-896283-42-X"Frontpage Express is included with Internet Explorer to make it easy for you to upload all of your HTML pages to a server" in ''Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 - Step by Step'', 1997, Catapult/Microsoft Press, ISBN 1-57231-514-8
- 1998 Microsoft FrontPage for Macintosh 1.0
- 1998 Microsoft FrontPage 98 (version 3)
- 1999 Microsoft FrontPage 2000 (version 9) included in some Office 2000 editions
- 2001 Microsoft FrontPage 2002 (version 10)
- Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003 (version 11)
- ''Notice: There is no official version 4 to 8, because after Frontpage was included in some Office editions, the Frontpage version numbers followed their Office version numbers. Nonetheless, version numbers may appear in the meta tags of HTML code generated by these versions of Frontpage.
