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Category: Microsoft FrontPage
FrontPage vs. Dream Weaver

hello,
I am a Front Page user, and not very sophisticated at that, but I am competent enough to develop and publish relatively simple Web pages for myself and clients. I am considering getting to the next level in Web development and am wondering whether I should concentrate my learning efforts on Dream Weaver (or other) vs. Front Page. More sophisticated Web savvy people are telling me that FrontPage is not the way to go. Any thoughts? I appreciate your help.

If it is a choice of the two go with DW. Much more flexible then FP in my opinion. I also do a lot of my work in a simple text editor dealing with the html itself. Even DW is going to stick some stuff in your code that you may not want.

Im making a mass multyplayer online game and i need a builder that can not only create a cool site but support my game and have a registration form what can do that then ill tell you whos better FP or DW :cool:

E-Mail me dont reply on the forom unleess you want to but e-mail me the reply with details so i can compare the 2 Darkdragon8691@netscape.net

Thank you and who ever gives me the best reply gets a free game membership thatnk you and ill be looking for that e-mail

I think dreamweaver rockS!

I personally haven't found anything that Dreamweaver supports that FrontPage doesn't, including the Adobe/Macromedia application line. And if there is something you find, just put it directly into the html. And Frontpage is simpler all-around - design, layout, settings, everything. If Microsoft has done anything right with their Office suite, it's FrontPage.

Dreamweaver bugs me in 2 ways:
- First, every **** release they change EVERYTHING. Nothing is where it was before, everything looks fancier, and I get less window space that actually displays the page. One of the worst ideas in editing was putting all the properties and extra windows on the right hand side of the page. You NEED to see the entire width page when designing something, if you want it to look right for preview! With FrontPage, you can install it without the annoying right hand panels (which only show up for tables and select other properties), or if you don't customize your install, it's extremely easy to turn off.
- Second, you're constantly tricking the program into doing what you really want it to do (not to quote the mac editing guy or anything, but it's true). Wether your in the html view, the WYSIWYG view, or the split view (all of which FrontPage has and handles better), it's consistantly doing things automatically, only allowing this or that, and making you search the menus and eventually waste time finding the setting that is stopping you from doing what you want to do. This all starts with Dreamweaver only letting you put in one space when typing, which is absolutely ridiculous. We are past that stage in computer & internet technology, seriously, why doesn't it automatically put in the  ??? Honestly, this is something I expected from the Word family, which allows typists to never learn how to spell nor punctuate as the paperclip auto-fixes everything (even things you don't want fixed)... but this time it's the other way around.

Well, dreamweaver will probably be no more (or at least hopefully). I've tried Adobe's GoLive and other web-related products, all of which I have been unimpressed with.

In any case, I suggest only making basic layout with a htmlediting program. Stay in split html view as much as you can; learn how things work, and do the majority of your editing in the html, not the layout.

Of the two, I'd definitely go with DreamWeaver. I think it's much better for scripting and FrontPage extensions don't always play well on Linux. Of course, I do most of my html in a simple text editor.

Thank you all for your comments and suggestions.

If you can afford it, Dreamweaver. No question in my mind. There is more of a learning curve, but cleaner code is generated, and more control is there. Dreamweaver is the tool of web designers. FrontPage is simply not.

I'm uncertain as to the comments by firsttodd. You can customize where the toolbars are (I have none on the right left for instance), I don't think you have to "trick" Dreamweaver at all. I've never seen it do anything I didn't make it do. I "pwn" it. A non breaking space (   ) can be added with the buttons CONTROL + SHIFT + SPACE. I've been doing that since the late 90's.

Neither FP nor DW get my vote.

FP produces noise in place of code which does not comply with any standards. DW is better now than when I used it but also goes out of its way to produce rubbish and second guess what you want.

For anyone savvy enough to manage their own hosting, or even those who are starting to master html and css, my vote goes with notetab from http://www.notetab.com - try the free version for a few days. It might mean hand coding but within a couple of weeks of using it my production was way up because I got the code I wanted and not what some script thought I wanted. Good and valid code first time round, lean and without all the noise.

I never did get around to learning how to script notetab to automate the things I do all the time. It has enough wizards for my needs and also automates css. I never tried it for php and javascript although that is available too, plus a few other scripting languages.

Try it for a few days and see if you too can fall in love with it.

Now I use a Mac, for no reason other than that Macs run PageSpinner and BBedit which together cost less than DW but do so much more. Including letting me do all my site development on the same environment as the server hosting the site.

Frontpage is for amateur webmasters. :D

Dreamweaver 8 is for professional webmasters. :cool:

I am glad that about 7 years ago I started with Dreamweaver 2 despite Frontpage being cheaper and easier to learn. Actually Dreamweaver is very easy to learn. I didn't read any manual. I taught myself to use Dreamweaver and I am sure you also can do it.

Now version 8 is absolutely great. I also have latest versions of Frontpage and Adobe Golive CS. I never use them for developing websites because Dreamweaver 8 is so good.

Comparing Dreamwaever with Frontpage is like comparing Google with Ask.com. :D

Dreamweaver all the way.

FrontPage cannot do good code, compliant code, proper css, cross platform pages.

Apart from anything else, FrontPage doesn't exist anymore - it has been phased out, because it is so rubbish.

Have you considered Expression Web from Microsoft? I work on the team so I'm mildly biased here. :) It's a professional design tool for creating standards based websites.

The second version of Expression Web is now available in BETA for download at:

http://www.microsoft.com/Expression/...x?key=web2beta

You can get the most feedback about the program by asking other users at our new forum for Expression Web at:

http://forums.expression.microsoft.c...US/web/threads

Anna
Expression Web

I have never used DW but I have had clients who did and stuff is spread out all over the place in the source. You'll have a body tag, then a style tag following it, then another body tag, it's a MESS from what I have seen.

You would think, with most people going to the .css file for formatting an entire website quickly and in one swoop, that DW would use that method. Does it? If so, I haven't seen it used in any HTML page I have inherited from a client to date. There are styles EVERYWHERE in the code. And new styles with each new page. Maybe it's the users and how MW is set up, but I'm not paying for that, lol.

I use Stone's WebWriter http://www.stoneware.dk/ , OOo, and Notepad, lol. All FREE by the way, smile. I'm into free stuff, lol.

Dreamweaver vs FrontPage
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There are two major WYSIWYG(What You See Is What You Get) editors available for beginners. These are: Microsoft FrontPage and Macromedia Dreamweaver. So the question is which one is better?

This article is not intended to humiliate Dreamweaver or FrontPage editors. I just attempted to analyze both programs from different points, based on Internet research, experience of other users and my years of html coding experience.

To say honest I am not the fan both of them. In our production we regularly use AceHtmlPro but the fact is that many of our customers DO use either FrontPage or Dreamweaver and that's the reason our employee have to be familiar with both. Writing the article I have talked to our stuff and did some research about both editors and I came up with the facts I'd like to share with you.

Pluses and minuses of MS FrontPage:

1. FrontPage as all Microsoft product has so many templates and ready to use solutions that you cannot admit it is easier for beginner to start using FrontPage to build his first website. You can create simple website personal or business with several clicks and all you will need to do next is to enter your text and pictures instead of used by FrontPage by default.

2. The good news is FrontPage html pages look exactly as they appear in MS Explorer and the bad news is that they look perfect ONLY in MS Explorer. However you may program FrontPage to get rid of nasty tags but I believe it requires some hand coding to adjust pages to Netscape or Opera. Another good news for FrontPage users: about 93% of all internet clients use MS Explorer 5 and higher.

3. As Microsoft application FrontPage is better with ASP pages, which are standard for Windows based hosting and windows based programming.

4. MS FrontPage perfectly interacts with other MS Office products. For example you can easily cut and paste some chart from MS Excel into FrontPage working area.

5. By default MS FrontPage uses table with the fixed width and sometimes it can be a problem to make it display tables with percentage width.

Pluses and minuses of Macromedia Dreamweaver:

1. You can build your own templates and use them to edit hundreds of pages of your website with one single click. Although Dreamweaver adds some comment tags to html file to distinguish editable and non-editable areas and I read in one forum that people experience some troubles applying template to more then 700 pages as they ran out of memory but I had never chance to test that.

2. Pages done with Dreamweaver usually have less trash in coding. They look almost perfect with Netscape, Opera and MS Explorer.

3. Dreamweaver doing amazing thing with SSI files and other server side include technology. Php code looks much nicer however with ASP scripts FrontPage still better.

4. Dreamweaver is much better interacts with other macromedia products.

5. Both editors in most cases display CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) correctly. But if you enter style attribute twice in Dreamweaver for <td> it will definitely ruin your page and you will be able preview your page partly before this error. FrontPage however handles such mistakes easily.

There are many others pluses and minuses in both editors if I wrote about al of them I should probably start a book rather then single article, but those I have mention I heard most about.

My idea is that MS FrontPage is ideal for beginners as it provides so much help and templates, then you should move to Dreamweaver when you feel yourself more comfortable with the html code and finally, if you are serious about web design, you should reach the hand coding level as it still best way for coding pages. It gives you the freedom of using tags and styles, as you want them to use. Do not forget however validate you hand coding, or code generated with FrontPage or Dreamweaver. You will be surprised if you knew how many errors produced during coding starting from broken links to invalid tag attributes. http://imagicon.info/cat/6-22/good.gif










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