Microsoft FrontPage

Microsoft FrontPage

Introduction

Microsoft FrontPage (full name Microsoft Office FrontPage) is a WYSIWYG(What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) HTML editor and web site administration tool from Microsoft. It was a part of the Microsoft Office suite from 1997 to 2003. It has since been replaced by Microsoft Expression Web and Sharepoint Designer, which were first released in December 2006 alongside Microsoft Office 2007. FrontPage was initially created by the Cambridge, Massachusetts company Vermeer Technologies Incorporated. Vermeer was acquired by Microsoft in January 1996.

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 pages and sites.

In 2006, Microsoft announced that FrontPage would eventually be superseded by two products. Microsoft SharePoint Designer will allow business professionals to design SharePoint-based applications. Microsoft Expression Web is targeted at the web design professional for the creation of feature-rich web sites. Microsoft announced that FrontPage will be discontinued from December 2006.

Advantages

1. FrontPage 2003 consists of a Split View option to allow the user to code in Code View and preview in Design View without the hassle of switching from the Design and Code View tabs for each review
2. Dynamic Web Templates (DWT) allows the users to create a single template that could be used across multiple pages and even the whole Web site
3. Interactive Buttons give users a new easy way to create web graphics for navigation and links, eliminating the need for a complicated image-editing package such as Adobe Photoshop
4. The accessibility checker gives user the ability to check if their code is standards compliant and that their Web site is easily accessible for people with disabilities. An HTML optimizer is included to aid in optimizing code to make it legible and quicker to process
5. Intellisense, which is a form of auto completion, is a key feature that assists the user while typing in Code View. When working in Code View, Intellisense will suggest tags and/or properties for the code that the user is entering which significantly reduces the time to write code. 
6. Code Snippets give users the advantage to create snippets of their commonly used pieces of code allowing them to store it for easy access whenever it is next needed
7. FrontPage includes support for programming in ASP.NET, a server-side scripting language, that adds interactivity to Web sites and Web pages
8. FrontPage includes support for macros in Visual Basic.