Generally speaking when most people are busy bitching about the flaws in Microsoft products I tend to agree but still admire the Microsoft Corporation for being able to dominate the market. As irritating and destructive as it may be for smaller companies it is an achievement for them and 90% (I made that statistic up) of businesses would probably love to be as successful.

However, what kind of planet were Microsoft on when they designed FrontPage? One would assume that with the huge fortunes Microsoft have gathered they would be able to afford to employ designers who knew what they were doing and could therefore implement compliant, clean coding into their product/s. Obviously not.

I don’t use pagebuilders/WYSIWYG editors out of principle. I refuse to recycle coding or rely on a program to fill in the gaps. Those who do use these programs deserve a set standard, whether they are lazy or not; especially at the price of Microsoft’s software. This is why FrontPage angers me enough to rant about it: it has no standards.

• A basic table structure can be achieved with a few lines in Notepad. This same basic table ‘drawn out’ in FrontPage often needs in excess of 20-30 lines of code, most of which are redundant or unrelated to the actual table.
• Style coding is not inherited by other elements and instead of being inserted into a separate, external stylesheet, is served inline. This means that fonts are rarely consistent across pages.
• The templating system which should theoretically wipe out the problem of lacking consistency doesn’t work. Images are often not included despite being the same on each page as paths are lost or changed by the program. For no reason.
• Even in the most recent versions deprecated coding is used which could be replaced by fluid, valid, semantic mark-up.
• Renaming a file inside the program (which is the only way to keep the navigational structure up to date) takes a very long time. I assumed this was because of multiple pages each inter-linking—no, it takes forever on a single page with no links.
• Single line breaks/custom margins are not allowed under headers. Spacing is obviously important, but a header is a header and not a completely separate paragraph/entity. I want my headers to look like they apply to the content beneath them.

Here are only 6 reasons why I’m anti-FrontPage. Give me another hour and I could probably come up with a few more. If you use FrontPage: stop. You will get cleaner, tidier, less-bloated code in Notepad. The feeling of satisfaction afterwards is well worth the extra effort.