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May 17, 1999

FrontPage's Evolution For The Millennium

A much-improved interface boosts this Web authoring tool

By Jeff Jurvis

First Look

icrosoft is good at taking mediocre products and remaking them over time into full-featured offerings. That's certainly the case with the FrontPage 2000 Web development environment, slated for a June release.

The Web authoring tool's ancestors all tried to be three tools in one delivered via two separate interfaces--the FrontPage Explorer and the FrontPage Editor. FrontPage 2000 has a much more efficient all-in-one interface with strong similarities to Microsoft Outlook. The new integrated interface makes a great first impression and is a marked improvement from the disjointed interfaces of previous versions.

The single document interface has an icon bar along the left edge. The rest of the window is filled with either one or two additional panels. When looking at file structures in FrontPage's File or Navigation view, users get a Windows Explorer-like tree view and the content panel. The Task and Reports views are single-panel tables.

Office Integration
Previous versions of FrontPage never quite seemed to integrate into Office. Microsoft has considered FrontPage a member of the Office line since FrontPage 97, but I never saw the underpinnings to support the claim.

FrontPage 2000 is more directly related to Office 2000 visually with its Outlook-like layout and functionality. FrontPage 2000 uses the Office 2000 spelling engine to check spelling as you type, littering text with those not-so-subtle squiggly lines under misspelled words. Missing are the other language tools--grammar checker and hyphenation--that also come in handy, especially for wordy Web sites.

Microsoft has extended the concept of themes--one of FrontPage's most useful concepts--across the whole Office 2000 suite. A theme is a predefined set of design elements for backgrounds, bullets, fonts, and colors. FrontPage themes work especially well in Microsoft Word 2000 and PowerPoint 2000, in which documents and presentations display a unified look.

But there are still places in Office 2000 where FrontPage integration is clearly missing. When opening a new HTML document in Word 2000 and viewing the HTML source code, Word starts up the Microsoft Development Environment to handle HTML code viewing and editing, not the easier-to-use FrontPage 2000, which I set as my default HTML editor in Windows Explorer. HTML documents created by Word 2000 are fairly complex. Word 2000 uses HTML as a full-fledged file format (including all formatting information) by embedding Extensible Markup Language in HTML comments--nothing that FrontPage 2000 can't handle.

Other notable user-interface features of FrontPage 2000 include elements new to all of Office 2000. Personalized menus are a radical addition that will cause an initial shudder in those who appreciate intuitive and efficient user interfaces. These new menus try to adapt to the user by rearranging menu items by their frequency of use. Some rarely used items are excluded from the menu but can be seen by selecting a new menu symbol. If you keep a menu open long enough, the hidden items will automatically appear. Personalized menus can be disabled, which I did soon into my evaluation, right after discarding the Office "Assistants".

Beyond the new look and feel, the three major functions of FrontPage 2000 are improved. FrontPage 2000 provides Web-site management tools, Web-page design and creation tools, and Web application development tools.

Site Management
FrontPage has always been strong in site management, especially for small and midsize sites. Improvements in FrontPage 2000 make it even stronger. Microsoft has reorganized and added site-maintenance tools that deliver reports through the Outlook-like main window. Maintenance reports cover broken links, orphaned pages, and estimated page load times. Project-management reports list page status, task assignments, and source-code control status.

Tasks are created and assigned in the Task View. You can also set task priority and status. In another obvious inconsistency, FrontPage tasks can't be imported from or exported into Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft Project.