On Thursday 07 February 2002 6:44 pm, Paul Munro wrote:
Hi!
Quick questions:
1. Is Frontpage any good (never used it myself)?
AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (Sorry about that). When I first started looking at developing Ringways' web site, having never done anything HTMLy before I looked at Frontpage. I liked it. I liked how easy it was to move around, how good it was at keeping a list of links between various pages and how it warned of broken links, and how easy it was to write web pages without knowing HTML. There were a few things it coundn't do, but it let you swap into HTML mode to do this yourself. As I progressed I found that there were other things that you couldn't do so I found workarounds. Then I found that some of the extensions wouldn't work even in the development suite/Personal Web server setup that it configured on installation. Then it went tits-up, totally corrupted the site, and I lost everything. Luckily, it has an import facility, so I simply imported the published version from our server and then re-applied the last set of edits. When this happened another twice, and on the last attempt refused to import, I dumped it and decided to do it all by hand - having learned a bit more HTML by this time. At this point two things happened. 1) I never looked back, development was just as quick, and a lot more reliable. Problems that I had lived with slowly disappeared. 2) I realised how crap Frontpage actually is at writing HTML. I ended up rewriting much of it by hand. Simple things like turning off tags in the correct sequence were too much for it. Anyone who's ever converted a MS Word doc to html will know exactly what I mean.
2. Does Apache support Frontpage/FP Extensions etc.?
I believe that there are modules for Apache to handle Frontpage extensions, as well as ASP and other standard/non-standard extensions. Personally I wouldn't touch most of them with a barge-pole.
Personally I would use HTML/Dreamweaver/Flash etc but I have a relative who wants to put up a web site and was recommended FP by a Linux user in the USA (?).
Horses for Courses. If the web site that they want to develop is small/simple and needs developing by someone who isn't slightly technical then FrontPage will do the job nicely. Anything more than that and I would suggest saving a lot of heartache and buy a good HTML book.
Thanks for your advice.
Paul
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