FrontPage 2000 vs XP

worthwhile upgrade?

[bill]

Been using FP2K since it first came out, and I'm very familiar with it's quirks so that I work with it. I've had a copy of FP 2002 sitting on my desk for months and have never installed it. I heard some stories early on that there were some differences in the interface and simply had too much work to do to be bothered with installing this and learning the new interface quirks. My question is whether there is a big difference between the two? Should I just stop procrastinating and install it?

[dstanovic]

Bill,

Install It :)

I like a few of the enhancements such as shared borders etc. I think it adheres more to html standards so there is not so much clean-up work to do.

Also if you do a custom install you can keep FrontPage 2000.

[Ove]

dstanovic

Igree with you install it

/Ove

[dstanovic]

Ove,

Are you another FrontPage user coming out of the closet?
:)

[Ove]

yes i have always used it and i think it works greate

/Ove

[brotherhood of LAN]

Been using FP XP for a few months now...miles better. It gave me the incentive to go dynamic. All the downfalls of FP 2000 are (almost) removed, while there are a few more options and customisation available. It still produces messy code though IMO :)

[nowhere]

If I remember correct, the interface is barely different. Somewhat enhanced with it's usage of tabs to change between pages, (reason enough to upgrade, if you already have a copy) but certainly not much of a learning curve.

[pageoneresults]

Definitely upgrade! There are a few new features that are time saving and the interface is easy to adjust to.

The new hyperlinks command menu is awesome allowing you to insert <a title> tags right when you create the hyperlink.

There are many other little things that have been added or corrected from previous versions. I waited about 6 months before moving from FP2000 to FP2002. Wanted to let everyone else deal with the frustration of a new MS release and then wait for the patches!

[bill]

One of the reasons I picked up this copy in the first place was the advertised better handling of XHTML. FP2K certainly wouldn't generate XHTML, and would mangle a lot of the test pages I entered in via HTML mode.

I may give FP2002 a whirl today after I get my WebmasterWorld fix...

[Axacta]

I am currently using 2000, and the XHTML feature certainly intrigues me. Anyone wish to elaborate on it? Also, any improvements to handling CSS?

[pageoneresults]

> Also, any improvements to handling CSS?

Oh, most definitely! The formatting menu (upper left corner) contains all of your styles separated by character or block level elements.

I use the FP interface to hand code all the CSS and format it the way I like it. I've never used a CSS editor so I don't know what I'm missing. It takes me a whole second or two to make CSS changes!

XML? Ha! Right click the page while in html view, click on the Apply XML Formatting Rules and viola, its done. But, you need to make sure that your html is properly formatted before you make the conversion!

[pageoneresults]

Here are some additional features you might find of benefit...

Open pages now appear in tabbed format across the top of the editing view.

There is an entire set of drawing tools that allows you to draw diagonal and vertical lines on the fly. I haven't quite figured out if this is useful in any way.

You can now set permissions from within FP.

Believe it or not, there are tracking tools in the new version. I've only looked in there a couple of times but it does look promising.

Quick FP Tip: You should work with your show all ¶ selected (Ctrl + Shift + *) as this works in conjunction with the Reveal Tags option (Ctrl + /). It doesn't get any better than FP! ;)