Rant - Frontpage

1

Gaaah! That said, I now proceed to the main part of this post.

A client asked me to fix a page which had some “minor” errors. Not a big job, just a little patching here and there. After I had accepted the assignment he told me that I needed some basic Frontpage-experience. Uh-oh, I thought. Frontpage - this doesn’t bode well.
And I was right, when I looked at the source-code, what greeted me? Hundreds of pages of unnecessary, incomprehensible code. I am this (") close to designing the whole page from scratch just for the reason that it pains me to see such a page online but there is a horrendous amount of content, so that would take more time than this is worth.
I fixed the page now, but it took way longer than it should have (more money for me but still) and I’m wondering - how many of you have a had (similar) bad experiences with Frontpage?

2

Used it once and refused to so much as open the thing ever again.

I’ve heard people complain before about Dreamweaver adding in spurious code, but I’ve never found it does that to mine. Frontpage on the other hand, systematically set about ruining just about every line I wrote. Sorry Kirupa. :slight_smile: But I can’t stand the thing.

I’d rather use Notepad, frankly. :sure:

3

Actually dreamweaver does clean code, maybe I should try importing frontpage html pages in dreamweaver and try cleaning them…

(however bizarrely frontpage html crashes my DW - for instance the tutorial templates crash my DW a few seconds after opening the doc…)

4

nah, I tried that, dw didn’t find anything to clean. it isn’t that the fp code is wrong, it’s just too much, specially xml pages :frowning:

5

I think FP2003 produces cleaner code than FP2002, but then again I’m extremely biased towards FP :slight_smile:

It’s ok - I won’t cry…as much :egg:

6

Well to be fair this would have been Frontpage back in about 1999. :slight_smile: But I was so scarred by the experience I haven’t tried any later versions. :sure:

7

the code I fought my way through was generated by 2002. maybe it’s the fault of the tard who designed the page in the first place, but no program should generate so much unnecessary code, even if a total moron was using it.

8

I have to use frontpage at school, I love dreamweaver 'cause it can produce very clean xhtml code that even I understand. It also supports like every common lanugage (ie. php, asp, cfm, jsp… can’t think of the others now). I can’t stand using frontpage, has anybody seen the function in dreamweaver for cleaning up word html? It propably helps fontpage too but I haven’t tested this.

9

hehe, dreamweaver can be just as bad in the opposite way of writing whack code: what you code doesn’t display correctly in the design panel… it’s like dw wants to be really standards compliant, but if you’ve got multiple classes of links and nested divs in tables, then DW dies…

:slight_smile:

10

that’s because the design view is based on another one of our favourite M$ non-standards-based products :stuck_out_tongue:

11

if your talking about IE, the page displays fine in it, so i don’t see why it wouldn’t in DW…

:slight_smile:

12

gawwwwwdd, Frontpage. I have bad memories of that, from back in the days when i just started webdesign. It confused me soo much! if only i started with Dreamweaver!