A History with FrontPage

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By Colin Ramsden, July 2006.

FrontPage logo It's official. Microsoft has announced that FrontPage is no longer being developed. (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HA101205221033.aspx) In their own words:

"After nine years of being an award-winning Web authoring tool, FrontPage will be discontinued in late 2006. We will continue to serve the diverse needs of our existing FrontPage customers with the introduction of three brand-new application building and Web authoring tools using the latest technologies, Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Designer 2007 for the enterprise information workers, Microsoft® Expression„ Web Designer for the professional Web designer and Microsoft® Visual Studio 2005 for the Web developer."

Although I didn't become aware of the planned demise of FP until I received the above notice in an MS Office newsletter emailed in April 2006, it seems it was old news by then. The official announcement was previously on 15Feb2006 with the announcement of Office 2007. The details were outlined a day later in an in-house "interview" on the MS PressPass site with John Richards, the then director of Windows SharePoint Services at Microsoft, to describe how these new products fit into the company’s overall approach to Web authoring technologies.
See Jump across to a separate website on the internet http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2006/feb06/02-15Designer.mspx for the full story.

"While both products are partially based on Microsoft Office FrontPage technologies, they are tailored to very different usage scenarios. We have built SharePoint Designer 2007 expressly for information workers in an enterprise who are creating and customizing Microsoft SharePoint Web sites and building workflow-enabled applications on SharePoint Products and Technologies. It provides these workers with versatile tools to produce more interactive Web pages that incorporate data from a wide variety of sources, as well as enable business processes and create powerful reporting tools on the SharePoint platform. SharePoint Designer 2007 also allows the IT department to closely manage all of these activities so that employees ultimately can more productively build and customize SharePoint sites and applications.

Expression Web Designer is focused on the needs of professional Web designers seeking to build high-quality, standards-based Web sites for companies. It provides exceptional support for integrating XML, CSS, ASP.NET 2.0, XHTML and other standard Web technologies into sites to make them more dynamic, interactive and accessible. Teams of designers using Expression Web Designer and developers using Microsoft Visual Studio will benefit from numerous integrated features that allow them to collaborate on the design and development of content and applications.

Microsoft is now truly able to deliver a comprehensive family of Web authoring products for the diverse needs of our existing Microsoft Office FrontPage customers. After we fully release SharePoint Designer 2007 and Expression Web Designer, FrontPage will be discontinued gradually. This process will bring our customers and partners a broader choice of tools that go far beyond the capabilities within the current FrontPage product to meet the needs of today’s and tomorrow’s Web authors, designers and developers. In the meantime, Microsoft will continue to provide current FrontPage customers with full product support through June 2008, as well as clear guidance on how they can smoothly migrate to SharePoint Designer 2007 or Expression Web Designer, depending on their roles and needs. "

In summary, it can now be said with certainty that Microsoft no longer are providing a web design tool aimed at the beginning web designer for simple WYSIWYG HTML generation, as was the purpose and function of FrontPage.

It used to be the case that MS Office products, such as Word, produced awful HTML output. There was a need for a dedicated HTML generation tool for creating simple web sites which weren't ASP based. Microsoft bought Vermeer FrontPage in 1996 and launched MS FP with Office 97. I first selected and used this tool in 1999 as the HTML editor of choice for generating HTML Help topics which contained the cleanest HTML code available from all the other HTML and HTML Help authoring tools available at the time. The fact that it came bundled "for free" with MS Office, meant that it was already on every writer's PC.

Learning HTML wasn't necessary to produce HTML topics once you had master pages defined in FP. I worked in a team of writers where I was the only one which "knew" (or understood the intricasies of) HTML and CSS. The others simply used the master pages as topic templates and wrote or edited the content. Rarely did they get themselves into trouble about page layout or applied styles. FrontPage served our purposes well for many years.

I used it from 2002 through to 2006 for the development of my own and other websites. It had its own idiosyncracies and bad habits which didn't suit my working style in some cases, but still was able to be made to produce the goods at the end of the day. In fact, my web site www.lotechsolutions.com was created in part to house topics detailing FP tips and tricks, as well as subjects detailing how to do some tricky web behaviour in a simple way using FP.

The ability to develop web sites and HTML Help using a widely available and simple to operate tool such as FP was the inspiration for the site name, lotech solutions—producing world class output with a minimal set of low technology type tools and technologies. All of the pages on my site are static HTML which make use of client-side scripting. No pages are created dynamically, or are database driven. Simple. And that's worked for me, until now.

I'm investigating the use of Microsoft's new generation of web development tools, and it appears that they have married their future success to their ASP.NET technology. It appears that MS want their web authoring customers to technically ramp-up and be web "developers", or go away. They're not targeting the original market which FP targeted and held for so long. Perhaps they think the Office 2007 product's web capabilites are sufficient. They make no mention of a simple replacement for FP, as they're pushing a more technical Expression Web Designer.

I'm cynical enough to think that MS may have only had a 10 year right to the product name. 10 years is up.
Goodbye FrontPage. Rest in peace. Born 18Sep95, Killed-off 15Feb06, Life-support officially to terminate 1Jul08.

A History with FrontPage

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