Is FrontPage any Good?

For developing HTML documents, programs such as Hot Dog and FlexEd32 still seem to be the best choice for those of us unable or unwilling to slave over a plain text editor. If you know what you're doing, a simple text editor can be used for creating even extremely complex Web pages and I'm sure there are plenty of HTML cowboys out there that insist on the pure approach of an old time, simple, text editor. There's nothing wrong with that, but proper HTML authoring programs offer speed and ease of use enhancements that will get the job done quicker and easier. For a beginnner you would be unnessesarily torturing yourself to use anything but the best tools for the job.

We are making an effort to evaluate the new tools as they come along and give you our opinion. Keep in mind that in order to keep up with the rapid pace of change in this market, we are unable to test each program as fully as we would like before declaring our opinions. Sometimes it's hard to tell "features" from "bugs". We will publish at least a little something about each program we receive within a few days of trying it out. As we have time to get more familiar with them, we may rewrite parts of our reviews (this ability to rewrite a review is one of the wonderful things about publishing on the Web). Please send comments to the authors of the articles. Don't be shy - we love controversy and we also want to know if we overlooked a feature or undervalued a bug.

Right now there are basically three types of HTML authoring programs. One type is the shareware or freeware programs that have been around for awhile like Hot Dog and FlexEd32. They are stand alone programs and surprisingly powerful and useful. The second type would be the a bit fancier programs like my current favorite HomeSite (recently bought by Allaire). They are much more feature rich and easy to use and are still stand alone programs. The third type are do it all programs like Backstage, FrontPage, and NetObjects. There are programs out designed to work with all three of the major word processing programs as one button type add-ons as well. In the last category, so far, I have only had time to personnally use Internet Assistant (IA) and it is certainly a much different animal than the older programs. It has a rather awkward way of dealing with tags and attributes and if you try to bring existing HTML documents into IA your asking for major problems. It is probably OK for converting existing documents to HTML - as long as you will be satisfied with very ordinary pages. The Netscape Hall of Shame refuses to accept any submissions of pages created with IA. The HTML converter for Excel is another beast, however. I am quite pleased with it. You can take some pretty gnarly spreadsheets, click a couple of times and end up with a damn nice looking HTML table.

We are going to try something new with our coverage of Microsoft's FrontPage. Taking advantage of the interactive nature of the Web we want to enlist the help of our readers in wrting the review of this major HTML editor. We want you to tell us your opinions of Front Page and what you like and don't like about it. Using a discussion group actually created with FrontPAge, your comments will be placed into a dynamic document, or discussion group talking about FrontPage. We hope this will work out well. Your comments should appear almost instantly and you will be able to comment on other people's comments, add your own comments, start new threads, etc.