August 18, 1997

Internet View: FrontP age Gets New Features By Jason Levitt icrosoft's Aug. 11 beta release of FrontPage 98 is packed with new features. Download masochists should proceed directly to www.microsoft.com to take on the 28-Mbyte download, which includes the two main FrontPage apps, called FrontPage Explorer and FrontPage Editor, as well as the FrontPage Personal Web Server and assorted utilities. FrontPage Explorer is the main program letting multiple users manipulate a graphical, tree-structured view of a Web site. FrontPage Editor is an advanced HTML editor. Microsoft has thrown almost everything into FrontPage 98. But backward compatibility with older browsers is a critical area that is largely ignored. Anyone who develops serious Web sites knows that you need to consider text-only browsers, Java-less browsers, browsers without Microsoft's VBScript or JScript, and others. Microsoft might suggest you use scripting combined with its proprietary Active Server Pages technology to handle browser differences, but that isn't going to fly with many Web developers. Cross-platform support. Macintosh still rules the Web graphics and multimedia domain, and companies like Adobe are delivering great HTML authoring products for Mac and Windows platforms. Sure, Microsoft has delivered a 1.0 version of FrontPage for Mac (PowerPC only), and I suspect we'll see a FrontPage 98 for Mac at some point, but that's not helping developers now. OK, I'm through complaining. The bottom line is that, whether or not you dig the Web-management capabilities, FrontPage 98 is a great way to add some advanced features to your Web pages. The FrontPage 98 Editor has a lot of desirable features, mainly menu selections and dialog bo xes that let you customize bundled Java applets and add interesting Dynamic HTML features without having to understand Dynamic HTML or Java syntax. There are also thematic templates, which you can use to apply prepackaged background graphics and other elements across a set of Web pages. Of course, FrontPage 98 has wizards. The most interesting are a bundled CDF Wizard, which makes quick work of creating a Channel Definition Format file for one or more of the pages on your site so that they can be used with IE 4.0, and CDF-compatible push products such as PointCast 2.0; and the Database Region Wizard, which fills in the script necessary to access ODBC database tables for use with Microsoft's Active Server Pages. Oh, and if you're not a download masochist, you can order the FrontPage 98 beta CD for $6.48. -Jason Levitt can be reached at jlevitt@cmp.com You can read his Internet Zone column on InformationWeek Online at techweb.cmp.com/iw/author/internet.htm . Back to News in Review Send Us Your Feedback Top of the Page

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