Jim Scott said:
My ISP these days is quite happy with FP extensions and provides me with heaps of
webspace so I can see no good reason why I should not use FP with all its bells and
whistles.
Can you?
Dear Jim,
First I want to congratulate you on asking a very good question and getting
all that interest from all those replys.
FP2002 (which is what I own and can speak about with some experience) can be
setup to generate code that is either very generic or quite specific to IE.
It can also be setup to not allow you to use FrontPage extensions. It will
most likely generate more html/asp code that you would if your hand coding
it. But it provides a visual interface for generating your html code,
tables etc. So it allows you to quickly approximate what your trying to
create before you tweak it at the html code level.
If you use CSS when applying the "themes" that FP makes available the code
will be much cleaner and more portable between servers.
The Microsoft Office Suite generates extermely bloated and idosyncratic html
code. Furthermore, to use the results really well in a Microsoft LAN
environment you have to add-on an MS Office server extension.
The FrontPage Server Extensions reduce the amount of code you have to find
and patch into your pages and/or write. However, you can find equivalents
(mostly) for every FPSE application already written in ASP, Php and/or Perl.
I can't address the security issues for FPSE under latest releases of IIS
and Windows 2003 server.
If you create a website that uses FPSE you automatically limit its
portablity. If you create a website using Php and/or Perl you can usually
migrate across both Windows and Linux/Unix webservers without much
re-coding.
There is supposed to be a version of FPSE for Unix/Linux.
FP and for that matter Dreamweaver are WYSIWYG html editors that trade time
for speed. You spend less time and generate more code, quickly. Neither FP
or DW will generate code that is as tight as a good html programmer does.
But a good html programmer is rarer and more expensive than a business
professional using FP and knowing a little bit about html.
Summary: If you need a portable Website you need to tell FP to generate
Javascript, and not use any other specific to IE coding.
You should use CSS where ever you can to consolidate formating code into a
single external .CSS page/file. If you want to use FP themes have them
saved/created as CSS. Study html code and especially review how to make
tables in html. FP sometimes screwup the code for tables. Its easier to
fix the code than get FP to fix it.
If you don't care about the size of the pages (the smaller pages load faster
to the end-user) then you can use FP themes without applying them using CSS.
If you don't care about website portability you can use FPSE extensions.
Microsoft has links to FPSE hosts so you should never run out of hosts.
If you don't care if anyone but IE users can read you websites you can leave
FP's code creation on its defaults.
Respectfully,
Tom Miller (
http://bccs.chatnfiles.com)
