why do people hate Frontpage?...

S

Smed

whenever i tell people i use Frontpage for my html editor, they give that
little laugh and say, "well i guess you aren't serious about making a
website"...

i really dont see the disadvantages to it but then i have only used
Frontpage so i dont know the advantages to the others...

why do people hate Frontpage?..

what editors would you recommend?..

-s
 
R

Runnin' on Empty

Smed said:
whenever i tell people i use Frontpage for my html editor, they give that
little laugh and say, "well i guess you aren't serious about making a
website"...

i really dont see the disadvantages to it but then i have only used
Frontpage so i dont know the advantages to the others...

why do people hate Frontpage?..

what editors would you recommend?..

-s


Homesite+

It comes packaged with Dreamweaver, but it's a separate install.

FrontPage is lame on many levels, not the least of which is how it creates
dynamic content... and forget the HTML it creates...
 
B

Beauregard T. Shagnasty

Smed said:
whenever i tell people i use Frontpage for my html editor, they give
that little laugh and say, "well i guess you aren't serious about
making a website"...

I suppose it is ok for a personal/hobby site.
i really dont see the disadvantages to it but then i have only used
Frontpage so i dont know the advantages to the others...

The best 'editor' is a text editor.

If you read the generated output source code, you might understand why
FrontPage is not a good choice. It helps to understand raw HTML and CSS.
Further, given its head, it will generate stuff that only IE users could
see.
why do people hate Frontpage?..

"Name the four worst HTML 'editors':"

4. Microsoft FrontPage
3. Microsoft Word
2. Microsoft Excel
1. Microsoft Publisher
what editors would you recommend?..

http://crimsoneditor.com/ is quite good. It is an editor, not a WYSINWYG
tool.

If you really need a Gui, try NVu. http://nvu.com/
 
N

Nikita the Spider

"Smed said:
whenever i tell people i use Frontpage for my html editor, they give that
little laugh and say, "well i guess you aren't serious about making a
website"...

i really dont see the disadvantages to it but then i have only used
Frontpage so i dont know the advantages to the others...

why do people hate Frontpage?..

Just about all of the WYSIWYG editors produce poor quality HTML. What's
more, they encourage the bad (and common) misbelief that building a Web
page with HTML is just like laying out a page for a magazine using
Scribus or Pagemaker or Quark Xpress. Frontpage in particular likes to
produce IE-specific code which is bad for non-IE users (like myself) and
bad for standards in general.

what editors would you recommend?..

I'll suggest Notepad but only to drive home the point that you can write
high quality, interesting pages using nothing but that simple tool. It's
worth doing (but only once!) as a learning experience. FirstPage from
evrsoft.com used to be very good, but ISTR that something has gone
downhill about their product and Web site. UltraEdit seems quite good;
I've been using it on a project for about two weeks now. It has a free
45-day eval period. Then there's JEdit which is 100% free. It is a
general programmers editor and more complicated than you need if all you
want to do is HTML.

I assume you're not using a Mac since you're asking about Frontpage, but
BBEdit is quite good on the Mac side.
 
B

bigdaddybs

Smed said:
whenever i tell people i use Frontpage for my html editor, they give that
little laugh and say, "well i guess you aren't serious about making a
website"...

These people don't seem to realize that you can create the page in
FrontPage Edit mode, and then edit the source to do what you wish. Yes,
there are problems with FrontPage, but there are "problems" of some
sort with ANY WYSIWYG and other editors.

Personally, I use FP in Edit mode to type in my content. (No groans...
I have absolutely NO CLUE how to use DBs for the sites I have that
could, and it's much easier to edit the HTML if FP has put the tags on
most of the stuff for me.) I do use the PREVIEW tag to double-check
that my editing has not screwed up the way I wanted the page to look,
and close it out. When I publish, FP keeps track of what pages are
linked where (images, other pages, subdirectories, whatever) on my
computer, and redoes the website links after everything's moved. (Other
editors do this, too. However, I've had cases where when I didn't use
FP for publishing, the links had to be redone "on-the-fly" live on the
web. Maybe I'm missing something here...(?))

And, yes... I have used Notepad at times. I also tried other
(admittedly free) HTML editors, and none seemed to work as well for
what I needed them to do.

Purists will probably say you should NEVER use a WYSIWYG editor, though
I'm sure all WYS's allow for much quicker and cleaner development and
prototyping. Yes, if you have your layout, you can use Notepad (or it's
cousins), though sometimes you will miss things that FP (or others)
catches.

If you feel comfortable with using FP while others don't, I don't see a
problem either. I would simply say to be careful and DO NOT USE any of
the "bells and whistles" that come with it... and DEFINITELY be careful
if you create forms and input fields. You should be able to find
examples by just searching for "forms html" or "form fields html" or
something like that, and add them into your HTML directly (FP source,
Notepad, etc.).

Everyone has their favorites.
i really dont see the disadvantages to it but then i have only used
Frontpage so i dont know the advantages to the others...

Personally, I don't either, and, as long as it works for me...
why do people hate Frontpage?..

Because it's a Microsoft product, plain and simple. They (MS) created a
webpage builder so anyone who has used almost any MS (and other)
product (especially word-processors) could use it, and people hate
that!
what editors would you recommend?..

I do agree that other MS products (Word, Excel, etc.) are VERY BAD at
creating websites. They put a LOT of extra code in the HTML (almost, if
not, EVERY line of HTML) that is unnecessary. (The only "extra" code I
leave in my FP-created/-edited pages are in the META tags.)

As I said, I've tried a few others, but as long as I'm (and you're)
aware of what FP will add in that shouldn't be there, of what it CAN'T
do, you validate your pages at http://validator.w3.org/, and the page
layouts are double-checked with AT LEAST Firefox, I, personally, don't
see a problem with it.

BS
 
J

Jasbird

I suppose it is ok for a personal/hobby site.


The best 'editor' is a text editor.

I actually use TextPad sometimes when coding because
- I prefer the search and replace functions,
- it loads instantly,
- you can add a syntax file which allows HTML to be displayed with basic
colour separation for elements, attributes, strings and content. From
this I conclude that all those people claiming to use NotePad as their
HTML editor are lying.

PS: I think I agree with the comments above too because I used to
Homesite a few years ago too. I prefer it to Dreamweaver's cluttered
layout.

Why would anyone use FrontPage in preference to GoLive, Dreamweaver,
Homesite or even TextPad?
 
J

Jasbird

whenever i tell people i use Frontpage for my html editor, they give that
little laugh and say, "well i guess you aren't serious about making a
website"...

i really dont see the disadvantages to it but then i have only used
Frontpage so i dont know the advantages to the others...

why do people hate Frontpage?..

what editors would you recommend?..

Ooops - The question was "why do I hate Frontpage"? I don't. I haven't
used it because everyone has recommended me not to.

What possible reason would I have for using it when I can use
recommended editors instead (like GoLive, Dreamweaver, Homesite, or
frigging TextPad)?
 
A

Andrew

snip>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>


Because it's a Microsoft product, plain and simple. They (MS) created a
webpage builder so anyone who has used almost any MS (and other)
product (especially word-processors) could use it, and people hate
that!

Hi Bigdaddy,

I seem to remember that many years ago Front Page was originally not
actually a Microsoft program. Did they buy out a company that was at
the time making a program called 'Front Page' and then apply the
Microsoft magic to it?

All the best,

Andrew
 
D

David Segall

Runnin' on Empty said:
Homesite+

It comes packaged with Dreamweaver, but it's a separate install.
If you have already paid for Dreamweaver why do you prefer Homesite?
 
B

Beauregard T. Shagnasty

Jasbird said:
I actually use TextPad sometimes when coding because
- I prefer the search and replace functions,
...mark of a good editor.
- it loads instantly,
...means it's not bloated.
- you can add a syntax file which allows HTML to be displayed with
basic colour separation for elements, attributes, strings and
content. From this I conclude that all those people claiming to use
NotePad as their HTML editor are lying.

Colour-coding, right? Quite beneficial. But, no, not necessary. Crimson
Editor does that by default; no additional files necessary.

If you take care how you code, leaving appropriate whitespace and
perhaps even indents of code blocks, Notepad will work well. However,
since it is a weak and basic editor, most people would choose something
better, especially a tool that can edit multiple files at the same time.
 
J

Jonathan N. Little

Beauregard said:
Jasbird wrote:

Colour-coding, right? Quite beneficial. But, no, not necessary. Crimson
Editor does that by default; no additional files necessary.

What I like about CrimsonEditor is that you can edit and make custom
syntax files. I edited the Perl file to fully include the CGI.pm syntax,
very useful...
 
J

Jonathan N. Little

bigdaddybs wrote:

As I said, I've tried a few others, but as long as I'm (and you're)
aware of what FP will add in that shouldn't be there, of what it CAN'T
do, you validate your pages at http://validator.w3.org/, and the page
layouts are double-checked with AT LEAST Firefox, I, personally, don't
see a problem with it.

Many would say you have it backwards. Build and view in Firefox (or
other modern browser) first then check and tweak if required to fix for
IE...
 
T

Travis Newbury

Jonathan said:
Many would say you have it backwards. Build and view in Firefox (or
other modern browser) first then check and tweak if required to fix for
IE...

But since IE is STILL the most popular browser I think this way is
backwards. Make it work in IE (what everyone uses) the tweek for the
lesser used browsers.

I am NOT saying IE is better, only used more.
 
R

Runnin' on Empty

David Segall said:
If you have already paid for Dreamweaver why do you prefer Homesite?

I (the company I work for, actually) purchases all my products in bundles
and suites, I may only use some of the software once or twice a year, but
when it's needed, we'd better have it.

I do notice that Adobe is selling Homesite+ on it's own for only $99.00,
what a deal, it used to be $600.00.


Why is Homesite better than Dreamweaver?

From a code only standpoint, Dreamweaver blows... macromedia tried to
incorporate some of the better features of Homesite into it for coders, but
it's still too cluttered and awkward to use for my tastes.

Once set up to your coding pref's Homesite is extremely fast for coding
HTML, CFML, PHP, and even ASP (although I don't use it), not so helpful for
CSS.

But that's not an issue, since a style sheet is the smallest part (as far as
volume) of the code.

First of all, the color coding does two things for you, it separates our
markup code from the dynamic code, (in mine HTML is green, CFML is brown and
PHP is gray), make it fast to find blocks of troublesome code.

This also helps if you typo'd a quotation mark, bracket or something, if the
code is not well formed, all the color coding skews, giving you a quick
heads up to start looking for the problem.

Secondly, with auto fill and code hint set to 0 seconds, I don't actually
have to type out entire tags or scripts to complete, for code that you use
all the time, it's a great time saver, to hit the left bracket key, the
first 3 or 4 elements of the tag, and then when you know (from experience)
the code hint selector is on the right block, hit the enter key and
complete.

You still have to know how to code, but once you are familiar with how these
two features works, your fingers can fly, and the code comes spitting out.

You can code a whole page in much less time than without it.

It even has a WYSIWYG side, but I've never used it and wouldn't know how it
compares to Dreamweaver, which I do know is miles ahead of Golive or
Frontpage.

As far as WYSIWYG code goes, I often have to modify code created in WYSIWYG
editors by both good and bad designers.

Dreamweaver is not actually that bad in code generation, but I shudder every
time I have to dig through that ugly, bloated crap that FrontPage or MS Word
creates, it's usually faster to just start over from scratch, which is
probably an intended feature from MS and not a shortcoming (from their
standpoint).
 
R

Rick Brandt

Travis said:
But since IE is STILL the most popular browser I think this way is
backwards. Make it work in IE (what everyone uses) the tweek for the
lesser used browsers.

I am NOT saying IE is better, only used more.

Initial testing should be run against the browser that more strictly
conforms to the standards. Then you tweak for the browser that is "wrong".
Popularity doesn't enter into it except that it would take a popular browser
for the second step to be even necessary.
 
B

Beauregard T. Shagnasty

Travis said:
But since IE is STILL the most popular browser I think this way is
backwards. Make it work in IE (what everyone uses) the tweek for the
lesser used browsers.

No, you have it backwards. It is far easier to write to the common
standards (which work in modern browsers) and later tweak what doesn't
work in the ancient IE, than it is to write specific IE crap and later
try to standardize it.

If you write well to the standards, there should be little to tweak for
Internut Exploder.
I am NOT saying IE is better, only used more.

Well, that's a relief!
 
R

Runnin' on Empty

Beauregard T. Shagnasty said:
No, you have it backwards. It is far easier to write to the common
standards (which work in modern browsers) and later tweak what doesn't
work in the ancient IE, than it is to write specific IE crap and later
try to standardize it.

If you write well to the standards, there should be little to tweak for
Internut Exploder.


Well, that's a relief!


Actually Standards are great as a goal post, but they apply best to static
brochure sites and not to anything approaching enterprise level.

Do this simple test, run any major enterprise level or ecommerce site
through the w3c validator, guess what, none validate.

That's right, the most expensive, intensively used sites with some of the
best and brightest developers in the country, (or out of the country), that
are making the most money, don't validate worth beans.

The reason is that there is more to successfully using the Internet (or WWW,
if you prefer), than making sure the HTML or CSS validates.

Making a simple 10 page vanity site, it should validate and conform to
standards, working on a major n-tier ecom application with several layers of
access, admin and functions, backed up by a multi terabyte database, you
concerns are more making sure it and the multiple functions0 work and are
secure against improper use, in the IE and Firefox.

This often means standards are thrown to the wayside in choosing better
methods for the task at hand.

I know this drives CSS and validation zealots nuts, but it's the case.

I'm all for standards, but they don't apply to every site.
 
D

David Dorward

Runnin' on Empty said:

Yes, there is more to it, but that doesn't stop validity being a yummy piece
of very low hanging fruit on the tree of quality assurance.
 
D

David Dorward

But since IE is STILL the most popular browser I think this way is
backwards. Make it work in IE (what everyone uses) the tweek for the
lesser used browsers.

Most authors seem to find it easier to get things working in browsers which
more closely follow then standard and then implement work arounds for IE.
This approach may not work for you, but it seems to for the majority.
 

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