Forum Moderators: phranque
right now if i have a page like
producta.html and i go
FILE> SAVE AS
in one place you can give it a name and title but you cant do description and keywords at the same time, you have to go into your source code and do those 2.. tyring to find one that lets me do it all at once... create a file, title, keywords and descripton
Dreamweaver and Adobe products are known to have much better standards support (i.e., don't break by design in other browsers).
Not an answer to your question I know - more an answer to your remark that you're considering this - my response is 'go for it!'.
Yes FP can produce some severe code bloat, use IE only/propriatary code. However if you take a few minutes when first launching the new install and tweak this is not an issue. Heck you can even create your own stock "new Page" so that when you issue the command for a "new blank page"it wll use your own stock page (This alone I find rather nice).
I think it is a tools kind of thing. I can produce a stock page that you can not tell if FP created it. I am not saying it is perfect, as we all know each WYSYWIG editor has it's flaws/weak points. I also use Dreamweaver. I also use notepad. I even used to use Hot Metal Pro. It just depends on the job I am doing and what I am trying to achieve.
Unfortuneatly I am not sure of an editor that can do what you want. FP can do global find and replace but each pages METAs for KW and desc. should be unique so I do not see the value.
Take care,
Brian
But I'd really dump front page like a hot potato. It introduces non-standard (ie only) stuff into your page that other browsers will choke on.
That statement is not true. It, FrontPage, does not introduce non-standard stuff. The user is responsible for this, not the program.
FrontPage will do exactly as the original poster is requesting.
Dreamweaver and Adobe products are known to have much better standards support.
Hehehe, I've seen Macromedia and Adobe products produce code on the same scale as FrontPage. It is not the product, it is the user.
It is not the product, it is the user.
We must be looking at different products, the products I'm looking at in their out of the box state, the above is not true. The user if left to their own devices with frontpage will fully destroy a good website, a user if left to their own devices with dreamweaver may not damage it irreparably, or at least it's harder to break a real site totally with dreamweaver than it is with frontpage.
The user if left to their own devices with frontpage will fully destroy a good website.
Can you give me some examples?
I have a copy of DW and it pretty much functions the same way as FP. Anything out of the box is going to have issues, whether it is FP or DW or any other WYSIWYG editor. As soon as you start clicking all those fancy little icons to add this or add that, you've crossed into the zone.
I've been a FrontPage user for eight (08) years. I know what it will do out of the box. I also know what DW will do out of the box. They both have their faults.
Many of the comments I see posted here knocking FrontPage are based on lack of knowledge of what the program is actually capable of doing. In fact, an advanced FP user can produce a site that is far more robust than what the other WYSIWYG editors can do. Why? Because we live in a Microsoft world and FP caters to that.
However, if you need an actual example what is to me self-evident from first hand experience, I just created a very complex CSS based layout for a client who uses Frontpage, or I should say, who used Frontpage, not any more, that template included some PHP function calls, and when he opened it and saved it, the page immediately failed completely and I had to send him a new one. This would not have happened in dreamweaver, no matter what you want to believe. The client is what I would term an average WYSIWYSGBUD (what you see is what you should get but usually don't) user.
I neither know nor care what the actual problem was, since I'd already warned him that Frontpage would probably break the code, as it did, I just uploaded the master file and overwrote the broken file, this is predictable behavior caused by a predictably bad product which I have zero interest in trying to make work so it becomes a mediocre product. The Frontpage links to other MS products is what's wrong with it, not what's right with it, that's why it breaks so much stuff.
I still use dreamweaver for some of its functionality, mainly site management/search and replace, which is useful, but not actually that necessary since any decent real search and replace app can do exactly the same thing.
Happily my client is smart enough to see what his direct first hand experience shows him so he agreed to immediately drop Frontpage and switch to dreamweaver.
I know that products like Frontpage can be forced to make reasonable code with enough tweaking, but why on earth waste the time to make it do something like that?
When I see a bad product, that's all I need to see, I don't then go, oh, cool, a bad product, how can I make it become sort of functional. I just dump it and find something that works better.
[edited by: isitreal at 1:43 am (utc) on Sep. 4, 2004]
and ie is slowly being abandonned for other browsers that are more standards compliant
Only in the geek community.
The rest of the billion or so web surfers will still use IE. About 93% of web surfers use IE as their primary browser.
Among the geek community we may use Opera or Firefox or Konqueror but the real world, out there, uses IE.
Remember that little band of geeks that little bill got together to hack together a new geek semi OS, what was it called, Basic? All the geeks thought that was the very coolest thing in the world, first real software copying started, that led to DOS which led to Windows, but now the funny thing is all the real geeks use Linux, program for Linux, surf with Firefox, argue if KDE or Gnome is better, build killer enterprise level apps released on the open source model, and Windows is just something that corporations feel comfortable using because there is a another corporation for them to deal with, but that's changing very quickly, geeks have a bigger voice than you might think, I work part time in a large organization and it's being switched to Linux servers, Firefox browsers, etc, almost all the backend stuff going open source, why? Because they have smart network admins, who dumped IIS first thing, moved to Apache, Samba etc, started working on securing and stabilizing the system, which means dump MS as much and as often as possible.
I neither know nor care what the actual problem was, since I'd already warned him that Frontpage would probably break the code, as it did, I just uploaded the master file and overwrote the broken file, this is predictable behavior caused by a predictably bad product which I have zero interest in trying to make work so it becomes a mediocre product.
FrontPage versions up to FP 2002 were not designed to work with php out of the box. There is an add-in required called PHP Rocket which allows FP users to work with and edit PHP code.
FrontPage versions up to FP2002 require the user to configure their Page Options to prevent the issues you describe. It appears that FP2003 out of the box is already configured correctly. I am testing FP2003 now. It has been just over a week and all I can say is that I am truly impressed. If you only knew the long list of things you can do with FrontPage while producing HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0 and 1.1 Transitional and Strict. I'm going to be posting a review in the next 30-60 days of FP2003.
If you read the advanced user manual for FrontPage, you'll see that you can work with just about any file type, php being one of them. While Macromedia may be configured out of the box to work with php, what about other Windows type files? Are there any issues to contend with there?
I've run thousands of pages of various code through FP over the years. And yes, in the beginning I would thrash code and break just about everything that was working with the page. But, I finally figured out that the out of the box settings were in direct conflict with HTML standards. I've sinced adjusted all of my preferences and can now produce valid pages on the fly.
By the way, small, medium and large site management is a breeze with FrontPage. You could easily have 25-50 users editing a site all in direct communication with one another using Microsoft Sharepoint Services [microsoft.com].
My info came from Zeldman's Designing with Webstandards book, a great read btw., read it if you haven't. Zeldman says the Webstandards Project was able to work together with MM and Adobe, so he may be biased, but he sure thinks FP does rather poorly when it comes to standards compliant coding, and says that Dreamweaver and the Adobe stuff has gotten a lot better while the same couldn't be said for FP - and see my comments above on FP.
I have no doubt that a skilled webdesigner who checks his code for validity will be able to create great, cross-browser rendering sites in FP. The advice is aimed primarily at those who haven't racked up all that experience, and may not have the sense to consistently check their work in firefox or opera.
Yes, most of the world still uses ie, but I know a lot of non-geeks using firefox now and there appears to be a lot of momentum behind firefox, and it really appears that MS has dropped the ball when it comes to ie. The 'no new browser until 2006' message will probably cost them their market share by the time the new browser comes out, and by then maybe the lethargy factor will favor firefox and not ie. 'I can install it in one minute, and it's the browser I'm comfortable with.' I certainly would not put all my eggs in ie's basket, unless I had the means to re-do all my HTML very quickly.
I have removed as much, if not more bloated code from sites created in DW as FP. Don't blame it on the product.
I don't use FP, but I have it. I like Namo, it has it's own quirks like any other product, but I like the clean straightforward interface.
You can see the features here [microsoft.com...]
When I'm asked to check out a page created by FP it takes me a while jsut to make any sense of it... in the process I usually remove about 10-20k of white space...
SN
I'll bet anything I can tell a FP site from a hand coded one no matter ho much you tweak...
Want to bet a year's salary?
See, without user intervention or setting options every program out there will stick these in the head tags.
I think people have seen too many newbies using the defaults and themes that all the programs will leave fingerprints of. In the hands of the right user you will never be able to tell if they hand-coded or used one of these programs.
Added: Every editor I have ever used can write W3C validated code - why do so many sites (probably 90%+)fail validation then? It is because no matter if I use DW or FP and I start adding bordercolors, height attributes etc. they will all fail - is this the user or the products fault? I can take FP 2002 and write W3C validated HTML code and validated CSS all day long, but most of the DW owners websites do not pass validation - the user or the products fault?
But, I finally figured out that the out of the box settings were in direct conflict with HTML standards. I've sinced adjusted all of my preferences and can now produce valid pages on the fly.
I think something everyone here who points out that it is theoretically possible to make these products good is missing is that the main reason to use these products is to allow general users to update things like intranet sites. So any talk of what you, a pro with years of experience, can or can't do is meaningless, it has nothing to do with the question of what these products do in the hands of users.
And it is the product, not the user, that causes the problems, to say otherwise shows a complete lack of understanding of the mindset of the standard average user. Frontpage was the problem, not the user, maybe it's a bit improved now, maybe not, as I said, I don't care, when I see a bad product put out bad code in its native condition I don't then go, gee, this is fantastic, I found a really bad product, as I said, how can I make this bad product become mediocre.
Dreamweaver was always better in this regard, it was at least mediocre when front page was bad, and if front page has now managed to rise to mediocre, good for it.
It's funny when you can explain just exactly why frontpage breaks code in the same breath as saying it's a good product, that's a good one, LOL as they say. I left all these problems far far behind me years ago, and have never looked back, though by chance at the moment I'm doing a little work for a big intranet type place that fortunately uses dreamweaver to let staff update their info, so I can give you some more meaningful feedback on that soon. Dreamweaver was chosen because it was a far superior product than Frontpage, which was dropped years ago for the problems I mentioned. Over the years I've read topics where people have been able to make frontpage useable, but, again, why on earth waste your time with that junk?
good is missing is that the main reason to use these products is to allow general users to update things like intranet sites
I seriously doubt that any of these products were developed for the purpose of intranets. I also would venture to say if they relied on this being their products purchaser they would be bankrupt.
For allowing users to update a site, I would and I have taken Macromedia Contribute over DW any day.
Pah! Do it the *proper* way - learn html and use a text editor ;-)
Pah! Do it the *proper* way - learn html and use a WYSIWYG editor to make site management a breeze. ;-)
Don't know what version of FP you used but it was probably before DW was a sparkle in the development teams eye. So you are saying that if any user purchases DW it will provide non-bloated, W3C validated code out of the box....
No, you are saying that, if you read my post you'll see that I most definitely did not say that, I said over and over that neither does a great job, just one does a better job than the other.
Dreamweaver has been a consistently better product than frontpage out of the box since the MS team decided to copy the dreamweaver idea, which I assume is how it happened, since that's how almost all MS products are first born, my first front page was I think 98, my first, and still current, dreamweaver was 4 (have mx but can find no reason to install it).
Since most users of these products do not get into tweaking them that much, the out of the box performance is the most important single element, and dreamweaver is getting better and better, in fact the first mx code I saw made me realize that dreamweaver had finally gotten to an acceptable level, except in CSS of course.
It's not great, or perfect, but it's much better than it was.
I use dreamweaver for only one thing, site management. Which it's good at. However, site management fits in fine with hand coding pages, although I have to admit I use the site management features less and less, and site programming more and more, my suspicion is that almost everything sitemanagement does is usually better done by programming, problem is most people don't know how to program. And Editplus could easily replace that entire function with a few simple lines of programming, allow loading of sites through folders, and allow search and replace through that folder without having files open, that's really all that's needed.
Never admit on a webmaster forum that you use Front Page
No, you should be honest in general, it helps other people know where you're coming from. I'm always amazed that anyone could ever have any reaction to frontpage, especially back then, than get this garbage away from me, but then I guess a lot of people got hired by shops where they had no choice but to make the best of a bad situation, then got used to it, then forgot it was bad, then say it's good...
I'm always amazed that anyone could ever have any reaction to frontpage, especially back then, than get this garbage away from me, but then I guess a lot of people got hired by shops where they had no choice but to make the best of a bad situation, then got used to it, then forgot it was bad, then say it's good...
Absolute rubbish! The above words are usually those spoken by someone who has not used the program and is merely making statements based on myths and untruths.
Never admit on a webmaster forum that you use FrontPage.
Why?
Hi my name is pageoneresults and I use FrontPage and am proud of it!
Any comments? I didn't think so. ;)
P.S. If you are going to the WebmasterWorld World of Search Conference in Las Vegas, give me a jingle while you are there and I'll bring tears to your eyes. You'll have a totally different perspective of FrontPage after spending about 30 minutes with me on my new laptop.
Dreamweaver has been a consistently better product than frontpage out of the box since the MS team decided to copy the dreamweaver idea, which I assume is how it happened, since that's how almost all MS products are first born.
FrontPage was on the scene before Dreamweaver. FrontPage was originally a Vermeer product (1995) and was acquired by Microsoft in 1996.
1995-11-01 - Vermeer Technologies Gives Birth to FrontPage [networkcomputing.com]
1996-01-18 - Microsoft Acquires Vermeer Technologies [microsoft.com]
Macromedia Dreamweaver 1.0 was released 1997 December and Dreamweaver 1.2 followed in 1998 March. Uh-hum, maybe Macromedia copied Microsoft in this instance? ;)
Yes I did use Frontpage, usually when I talk about something it's because I have experience with it, and when it's bad experience it really sticks in my memory, it's the first product like that I ever used, and it was ridiculously and absurdly bad when I used it. That's why I stopped using it. And why I keep using good cleanly written software that doesn't get in my way.
I always try to give new software a fair chance, then when I find that it isn't made very well, I dump it. Dreamweaver I found useable for a bit longer, and still find some use for today.
I know there's a certain part of the web market where using these kinds of tools really helps whip out sites, it's just not a part of the market I've ever had any interest in taking part in, but if that's the part that pays your bills, more power to you I guess.
I'll assume you had to use FP for reason x or y, learned its ins and outs out of necessity, and now are used to it and have it fit into your workflow, I've never doubted that any of these products can be made to work, I just have never understood why anybody would bother, but there's lots of things I don't understand so I guess I'll leave this as one of those. I remember reading somebody who was very happy because they had figured out some registry hacks to force an older FP to actually stop breaking all the HTML, but that's more proof of how bad it was than how good it was.
However, none of this has anything to do with my original point, which was having client x try opening a page in FP 2002 and having it break that page, predictably. I told him it would probably break it based on my experience, and it did break it. This is why I call it a bad product, it's very simple really, when a product behaves in predictable ways, which are bad ways, I call it a bad product. You can call it whatever you want.
[edited by: isitreal at 12:41 am (utc) on Sep. 9, 2004]
Yes I did use Frontpage, usually when I talk about something it's because I have experience with it, and when it's bad experience it really sticks in my memory, it's the first product like that I ever used, and it was ridiculously and absurdly bad when I used it.
How long ago was this? If you are referring to FrontPage 97, 98 or 2000 then I can sympathize with your viewpoints.
Much has changed since you last used the program. I'd like to personally quell all the negative comments about the program as most of them are based on past versions (old) and not current ones (FP2002 and FP2003).
I'll assume you had to use FP for reason x or y, learned its ins and outs out of necessity, and now are used to it and have it fit into your workflow.
Good assumption. We're talking 1996 here and I had to purchase a copy of FrontPage 1.0 because it was rated as one of the best WYSIWYG Editors at that point in time. I also used the Netscape editor at the same time. At that point, I was as green as green 347.
I've since lost the moss and continue to use FrontPage to this day and will do so into the future. I've been through all public versions from FrontPage 1.0, 97, 98, 2000, 2002 and now 2003. There is nothing wrong with the product for both beginners, novice and, advanced users.
There is nothing wrong with the product for both beginners, novice and, advanced users.
This is a false statement, the version I just had to deal with was 2002, and it was doing all the same junk 2000 was doing, that's why I was able to predict its behavior without ever having used 2002. If it had suddenly and magically become good then this prediction would have been false, but it wasn't.
The large institution I work for sometimes made exactly the same decision for the exact same reasons. It's misleading to claim that this product will work well for clients or non-expert users out of the box, it won't. Advanced users can make any product work, including notepad.
The reason I could assume how your exposure to this happened is that the product is so bad that the only way someone would stick with it is out of necessity, then of course you learn its ins and outs and set it up to actually work for you, the last part is probably easier to do now on later versions I would hope, it was almost impossible on 2000, but the key point here is that in the year 2000 I had the choice between dreamweaver 4 and Frontpage 2000, I tried both, and dreamweaver was far and away superior, in almost every respect.
I've since moved on and now only do programmed handcoded sites, using clean html editors, since I think the interface is signifantly superior in my 700 kB app than in either DW or FP.
But for standard users, who don't want to learn all about HTML or CSS, I still think these products have value, although since almost every website I've ever taken over was written on dreamweaver or frontpage, I have a very strong aversion to either product when it comes to what they do out of the box, but frontpage continues to lead in the race of worst code put out by wysiwydg editors, a long time ago netobjects [I think that's what it was called] was tight in that race, but they unfortunately dropped out due to bankruptcy and left MS holding the leaders trophy.
In one place you can give it a name and title but you cant do description and keywords at the same time, you have to go into your source code and do those 2.. tyring to find one that lets me do it all at once... create a file, title, keywords and descripton.
We know that FrontPage will allow you to do this. Not sure about Dreamweaver though.
