Articles: Why you should stay away from Frontpage

For those of you that doesn't know what Frontpage (FP) is, lucky you. it is a What You See Is What you Get (WYSIWYG) editor from the empire of Microsoft. It produce the same bloated source as if you create a page in Microsoft Word and save it as a HTML file, if that mean something to any.

FP totally lack support for the World Wide Web Consorium's Recommendations. And maybe the worst part, if you write proper code in its source mode it will mess up that as well. It will bloat the source with a whole bunch of tables and <font> tags, which has been deprecated since the early days.

An important point here is though, if you are aware of all the shortfalls of FP and still choose to use it, and fix the source manually afterwards, then I don't care, you're free to do so. Then you have grasped the concept that both Frontpage and Dreamweaver, and other WYSIWYG editors are ment as tools, as in, it was never intended to do the whole job. Personally I prefer to write the full source from scratch, others do not.

If you, on the other hand, don't clean up the mess that Frontpage make, you're visitors are in for an unfriendly experience. For one thing it will usually guarantee that visitors using another browser then Internet Explorer will fail to get the content in a reasonably manner. Not to mention the poor users having a 64kbps Internet connection and have to load five times as much data as necessary.

Accessibility is the keyword of web content. For people with disabilities, using special browsers it might be even more important. Non-compliant websites make it very hard for this special group to use the website at all.

Please; do us all a favor and stay away from Frontpage unless you have a MS-executive standing behind you with a gun pointing at your head if you move away from it, and then, use the source editor.