I must admit that I use Microsoft FrontPage quite a bit. It's not that I am particularly fond of
product, it's just that FrontPage has a very simple, easy-to-use WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. This is especially true of it's support for tables and lists. In fact, I'd venture to say that FrontPage has by far best WYSIWYG editor on market.I began using FrontPage many years ago, when it was a free add-on to Internet Explorer called FrontPage Express (if there was a paid version available at time I didn't know about it). One day I remember receiving a copy of Microsoft Office with a demonstration disk for FrontPage 97. It sounded interesting so I tried it out.
The product was very nice, and even that early in HTML editor game it was in many ways superior to what we have on market today. However, on downside, FrontPage 97 crashed a little more often that I would have liked (but hey, it's a Microsoft product, so I was used to this and didn't really think much of it at all) and it had this annoying habit of thinking it knew better that I did.
The entire Office suite has this problem: products try very hard to prevent you from doing something that is not "correct". In FrontPage, for example, there are times when it will not allow you to resize a table for no apparent reason. The program simply seems to think it's a dumb idea and will not let you do it.
FrontPage 98 was a vast improvement over previous version, and I quickly upgraded. By now, however, I was learning a bit more and had discarded many of features that product offered. First to go was templates - these are a great idea but implementation, quite frankly, sucks. Not only is style of any FrontPage site created from templates so recognizable that it screams "amateur" to everyone, they simply do not buy you very much in way of ease of web site creation. Templates seem designed to limit a person into a specific, Microsoft approved style of web site design, and that design is, well, stupid.
Next to get thrown out was automatic upload feature. You see, FrontPage has a wonderful feature (well, it would be wonderful except ...) which will upload all of your changes (and only your changes) to your web site. Unfortunately, implementation is completely lame. FrontPage will not transfer CGI and perl routines in ASCII, and thus upload feature cannot be used on a web site which uses CGI. To top that off, upload feature is so awesomely slow that it's possible to believe design specification required slowness to be built into product. It's so slow that it's hard to believe this could have happened by accident.
Hover buttons are a great looking feature, but as with many other FrontPage extras implementation is lame. The form handling of FrontPage is so poorly implemented that I found it completely unusable and installed my own CGI routines (thus leading to issue described in previous paragraph). The dynamic HTML features are quite simply awesome, but again implementation is lame.
