My comments to the recent post Jim Boykin had about some hosting companies discontinuing support for FrontPage extensions:
Jim – love most of what you say but man am I sick of people busting on FrontPage. FrontPage is a tool, much like a paint brush is to paint a picture. If you give a paintbrush to someone who is inexperienced or not talented, you will get an ugly painting. If you give it to a talented artist, you’ll get something marvelous. FrontPage’s problem all along has not been the software. Its been the market. It was aimed at people with no experience and as such 99% of them used the tool to produce ugly, broken sites. By contrast, most people using DreamWeaver have more design/development experience. Sure FrontPage has a few quirks and issues, but I believe most people just jump on the bashing bandwagon without truly knowing its power. Ever tried their Database Results Wizard? Wow! I’ve yet to see anything in DreamWeaver or other products than can help someone with no programming skills or knowledge build a truly dynamic site. Amazing. Sure it has its place and limitations – its not the right tool for everything, but its a pretty decent tool in the right hands. Regardless of its limitations, its a very handy publishing tool and IMO much better than DW on that front. I’ve been using both for years, and each has its time and place. Note that I’ll vouch for 2002 or later, not the earlier versions.
Okay now that that rant is done, thanks for the updates. I would bet that the only “broken” issues would be when people are relying on FP extensions. That would include:
– publishing with FP
– FP-driven forms
– FP-driven database results pages
– FP components such as include pages, etc. you can easily convert things like include pages by making your pages asp or php and using a simple include call
Hi Jon,
Know that I’m not totally a frontpage basher…. in fact, I’m a closet frontpage user myself….in fact, our employees here do all the client reports in frontpage as well…I actually like frontpage…but yea, I do take ribbing from my inhouse designers (always have), and get ribbed often about using frontpage more than dreamweaver….I was just passing some ribbing along….perhaps to hide that I too use frontpage 😉
But I will admit that I’ve created some rotton pages with frontpage that are still out there….but they’d probably be worse if I used dreamweaver – ha!
Cheers!
Jim
Hi Jim,
Design truly is an art, both FP and DW merely provide tools to publish that art. Neither of them, IMO, has a significant impact on the appearance of the site…
That said, I’ve been using FP for a good 5 years, and DW for only like 3 years. I know FP better, and really the key thing I like is their Database Results Wizard and suite of DB interface tools. It allows a guy who’s not much of a programmer (me, for instance) to build some dynamic sites. To your knowledge, does DW have anything like this? Wizards or WYSIWYG interface to handle basic dynamic site programming-type activities? Maybe I’m just missing the boat?