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.
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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.
By
Oleg Lazarenko