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FrontPage 2000:
Why 2K?
(Part 3)
By David Fiedler
What's the story from a more technical viewpoint?
The HTML Preservation Society: FrontPage 2000 can finally be used without worry that it's going to "screw up your work". Unless you tell it to rewrite your HTML style (which you can, and specify how), it generally won't. End of problem. It still does things like close paragraphs and other tags left open, though.
Not only can you specify how you like your HTML to look, but you can read in a sample page that you like the formatting of, and FrontPage 2000 will rewrite future code to match these favorite styles. In WYSIWYG view, you can select text with the mouse, then click the "Format Painter" icon. Selecting a different area of text will now copy the format/style of the first text selected to the second one.
You can also do things like "insert table" and FrontPage will prompt you with a dialog box, then create the table for you...whether you're working in the HTML or normal WYSIWYG view. And -- very reminiscent of HotMetal 5 -- you can hit a key combination in WYSIWYG view and instantly see all the HTML tags as little floating yellow thingies.
Themes: there are 10 new professionally-designed themes, for a total of 60 or so. Unfortunately, the themes themselves are still one of the weakest points of the FrontPage package (though they're improving).
The good news is that the program that lets you customize themes is no longer buried on the CD for gurus only; it's an integral part of the theme window. It now lets you easily change things like graphics and even the font style used on banners, as well as displaying the CSS style sheet settings it's using.
DHTML and CSS: Dynamic HTML and Cascading Style Sheets are now directly supported in FrontPage 2000. While I don't generally care for "special effects" messing up an entire page, sometimes they can come in handy when limited to a small area. There's not much control over the DHTML effects they provide unless you limit compatibility to Microsoft Internet Explorer as a target browser (surprise).
I couldn't get some of these effects -- notably the mouseovers -- to work, or easily figure out where was the JavaScript file to make them work (animate.js). The good news was that while I was looking for this file, FrontPage had already copied it into the directory I was working with, so that when I was ready to upload my HTML files to the server, the file was already right there.
Unfortunately, FrontPage 2000 unaccountably changed the link on the fly, forcing me to move the animate.js file to my root directory, where I really didn't want it. This all works transparently, though, when publishing FrontPage Webs.
There's lots of support for CSS style sheets, including external ones (the only way to fly for more than a handful of pages) and for CSS 2.0.
But the real power of FrontPage 2000 is how it integrates with the other parts of Office 2000...
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