So one by one really powerful features of FrontPage have proved themselves to be too limited, slow or poorly implemented to be of use.

However, WYSIWYG editor is wonderful, so when FrontPage 2000 was released I was fairly excited. And FrontPage 2000 was a vast improvement over earlier versions of product. In fact, I believe entire Office 2000 suite was as close to perfect as it could get (besides an occasional bug). In my opinion, Microsoft should have stopped development on entire suite at that time, as there really is nothing useful to add. I know in my own workplace my users probably use about 5% of suite's capabilities, and remaining features are more than enough to satisfy occasional power user.

I was looking forward to upgrade to Office XP. I don't know why, since I basically am not using product all that much anymore. I simply use FrontPage 2000 as a WYSIWYG front end, then go in an edit HTML code by hand where necessary. In fact, lately I've been finding myself switching back to good old FrontPage Express more and more often.

Nonetheless, I looked forward to new product (I mean FrontPage 2000 was a very good upgrade after all) and eagerly ran to my desk with new copy day it arrived. The upgrade went in easily and quickly ...

And within 2 hours product had been removed from my system. I believe this is quickest uninstall on a major product that I have ever done.

Now keep in mind that I did not perform a feature-to-feature comparison between two products. I was going to do so, but FrontPage XP did not even pass initial first look. The product was that horrible.

It wouldn't even render my pages properly. My site is handled perfectly well by every browser that I've checked it in and by every single other editor I've tested. There is absolutely nothing unusual about it in any way. Yet FrontPage XP could not show pagers properly.

The product had even more "FrontPage-isms" than before, and it was slow. Very, very slow.

So I will be brief and finish up this article quickly. I wouldn't recommend anything about FrontPage XP, and for that matter, complete Office XP suite to anyone. I have no idea why anyone would accept this product for free, much less pay for it.

To be very crass about it, I kind of view these products (FrontPage XP and Office XP) as equivalent of expensive working girls. Sure, you will have fun, but it will cost you a fortune, you will catch a virus or two, you may get worms, and you'd be much better off staying at home talking to your wife or girlfriend.

FrontPage 2000 is fast and easy to use, which are my primary motivations. In addition, it's easy to learn and teach to people who don't have any desire to be webmasters. They just want to create some nice looking web pages and focus on content.

Now, some cautions. Don't even think about using template feature of any version of FrontPage. This is one of most poorly implemented, idiotic features even implemented by Microsoft. Use templates and you will be immediately branded "amateur", and your site will not be looked at seriously.

Be careful using any of "special" features such a hover buttons, dynamic effects and so on. The implementation in FrontPage is, well, stupid. Also, if you want to use CGI routines, then you cannot use FrontPage's automatic upload feature (it will corrupt your CGI routines and data).

So why use FrontPage at all then? We use it at our office, mostly because we have already purchased entire Microsoft Office suite and FrontPage just happens to come with it all. This makes it a very obvious choice for our environment. FrontPage is not cheap by any means, and it would be difficult to recommend for a home environment. There are other editors which cost less (although they are usually less functional as well). I'll go over these in a future series of articles. I've actually found that old FrontPage Express program that used to come with Internet Explorer is more than adequate for most people.

Oh yes, as far as FrontPage XP (also known as FrontPage 2002) - don't even bother. This newest version is a huge step backward. If all you can get hold of is this new version, then find something else.