Posted by Andy Dingley on 08/24/05 01:57

On Tue, 23 Aug 2005 20:07:34 +0200, "Barbara de Zoete"
<b_de_zoete@hotmail.com> wrote:

>What is good about FP is that it can get people to publish on the net, who would
>never have done so without the software.

One of the best things about the web is this easy access for people with
no other publishing route. However what they need is "software", not
necessarily Frontpage. There are any number of similar small-scale
vaguely wysiwyg packages which are both vastly cheaper than FP and
considerably better.

FP just isn't a good product. It makes bad markup by any standard, and
it carries a "professional" pricetag when its markup really is anything
but professional quality. Worst of all, it's a publishing tool for M$oft
Blackbird (anyone remember that ?), not for the Web. The web has
standards (FP ignores these) and it is cross-platform (it ignores this
too).

There is a niche for simple web publishing tools which I'm very much in
favour of supporting. I'd almost support FP if it tried to address this
- but it doesn't. FP could be simpler than it is, if it chose to address
simpler targets. In typical M$oft fashion though, it's seen as vital
that it offers every possible dancing penguin and complex feature,
whilst still not doing a good job of the basics.

I'd like Dreamweaver to be better. I don't like that either, although
it's better than FP. There is a market for a professional WYSIWYG tool,
one that assists the task of professional (i.e. paid) web developers.
This could cost real money and it can require a learning curve, so long
as it saves time in use and it delivers good markup. DW almost manages
this, FP fails completely.

HTML coding just isn't that difficult. With a good CSS stylesheet
already produced, I can author the HTML with a text editor faster than
someone with DW or FP, and I get a better end result too. FP almost
manages to do this too - the CSS "themes" are a far better idea than
DW's reliance on templates, although their implementation was poor an
their documentation was downright misleading as to what they were for.

FP's biggest failure is as a teaching tool - and this is why beginners
should be kept away from it more than any other group. FP teaches the
idea that you _need_ complex WYSIWYG tools to build web content (you
really don't) and it also teaches that a complicated page is a good
page. It teaches _nothing_ of good design styles, and certainly not good
coding styles, particularly not for CSS.

>All because of FP and the like. If it wasn't for FP, the net wouldn't be
>half as interesting as it is today. :-)

"The like" possibly. But you simply don't need FP when there's HomeSite,
CoffeeeCup and HotDog as well.


--
Cats have nine lives, which is why they rarely post to Usenet.

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