tedster - 9:30 pm on Mar 23, 2001 (gmt 0)

I also have very angry feelings about the sites I inherited which were originally developed in Front Page. "Cleaning" the code to make it standards compliant is not a small job, and the client is often very anxious during the process, when visible results are non-existent.

The first page I tackled for a current client went from 160kb to 38kb in the process -- with absolutely no change in appearance or functionality (except the download was a lot faster.) Cleaning one page took a full day's work, and it was very tedious work.

122 kb of spurious code is not just a quirk, it's a train wreck! To be "fair" to Front Page, I'm sure that a lot of the extraneous code came from uneducated use of FP, but there's a lot of that going around.

I'm also happy to say that this page, which was previously invisible on all search engines, now dominates several keywords. This is as it should be, since off the web this company is dominant in their market.

A big part of the responsibility for the train wreck lies with Microsoft's marketing of Front Page. They continue to push the idea that FP is a way to allow a company's secretarial pool to create website content with minimal web-training.

Such a prospect is nonsense. The secretarial pool does not do the design and pre-press for the newest direct mailing. These jobs require specialists, and so does the website.