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November 19, 2010

Features of Microsoft FrontPage

Created in 1996 by Vermeer Technologies Incorporated which was then acquired by Microsoft a year later, FrontPage was branded with Microsoft Office suite until 2003. Microsoft FrontPage is a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) HTML editor. Due to the popularity of the software, many web hosting providers offered hosting packages accompanied by FrontPage features and add-ons.

There were many popular features of the final release of FrontPage including:

• Dynamic Web Templates
• Interactive buttons
• Intellisense
• Code snippets
• Support for ASP.NET

The final version is the only variant of FrontPage that includes Dynamic Web Templates which allowed users to utilize Code View to program and Design View to preview with the need to switch between the two tabs. Interactive buttons assisted users with creating web graphics and links without the need for an image-editing package such as Adobe Photoshop.

Intellisense was another new feature in the final release of FrontPage in 2003. This was an auto-completion function that suggested properties of code the user was consistently inputting during programming to reduce write time. Additionally, the Quick Tag Editor displayed the tag the user was in while editing.

Code snippets provided the advantage of creating snippets of commonly used code to store for easy access at a later date. This decreased the amount of time it took to program a web page. Also, FrontPage offered support for the ASP.NET programming language which is a server-side scripting language that creates additional interactivity to web pages.

Through the shelf life of FrontPage (include the Vermeer version), there were a total of nine variants released. Interestingly there was no official version 4 to 8 since many were included in Office editions. As a result, the FrontPage version numbers coincided with the Microsoft Office version numbers. However, version numbers continued to appear in the Meta tags of HTML code generated by those versions.

Although support is no longer offered for Microsoft FrontPage, many web hosting providers have continued to release hosting packages for the software. These plans contain many compatible features that give website creators functionality and flexibility in their design.

Microsoft FrontPage has been an extremely popular website creation program since its conception in 1995. Microsoft decided to phase out the software but is planning on releasing a new program that contains many of the functions from FrontPage. This will be updated to handle new technologies and programming languages.

Tags: Vermeer Technologies,  FrontPage,  Microsoft Office,  WYSIWYG,  HTML editor,  dynamic web templates,  Intellisense,  code snippets,  asp.net