mivox - 7:34 pm on Mar 23, 2001 (gmt 0)

It's not for everyone, but it's a good program for many.

FrontPage is probably a great program for a home hobbyist, who's not interested in expanding their web presence or effectiveness beyond their own personal site. It's fine for a business who just wants an online brochure, so they have a URL to put on their business cards.

However, if you're building an ecommerce site which will need good search engine ranking...
if you're interested in being able to easily adjust your work for the purpose of improving search engine positioning over time...
if you're interested in building a standards-compliant site that will display properly in the next generation of browsers and will degrade gracefully in older browsers, text-only browsers, audio browsers for the blind, etc....
In short, if your interested in building a high-quality, professional-grade, accessible website, a program such as FrontPage, which uses bizarre, proprietary markup in the source code, and doesn't come anywhere close to conforming to any accepted standards of HTML, is a BAD choice.

Frontpage has some quirks. ANY wysiwyg has some quirks!

Well, having used Adobe GoLive and having talked to many Dreamweaver users, I can say that the "quirks" inherent in professional-grade WYSIWYG HTML programs do NOT include generating mangled code. The only errors I regularly get when I validate my GoLive-generated HTML is the fact that I forget to include ALT tags for all my images.

I was once asked to 'clean up' a site built in FrontPage, and after looking at the source code, I ended up re-building the entire thing. The only code I've ever seen that was worse was generated with PowerPoint.

I dont' see crticism like this as "bashing" in any way. I would see "bashing" as making unqualified or untrue negative statements, or using entirely subjective insults against the "bashing" target. Everything that's been said about FrontPage in this thread (and other threads around WebmasterWorld when the subject of FP comes up) is factual.

Anyone who's trying to become a top-notch web professional, whether in the areas of web design, search engine optimization, or building and running their own commercial website, would be very well advised to mind their standards and stay the heck away from FrontPage.