I think it is important to mention that there are two components of
FrontPage, a the web editing and
management IDE, and then there are the
server extensions. What's the
difference?
The
FrontPage editing environment is a fairly poor editing IDE when you
compare to other options for professional development in the
industry (
GoLive and
Dreamweaver come to mind as being far
superior). It is very depreciated in the
Microsoft Office suite with the onset of (slowly improving)
HTML output
quality across all of the
applications. It allows you to manage a web site, veryify it's
syntax, and publish across many web pages. There is another similar program from
Microsoft in
Visual Interdev, which is geared towards the code side of things. FrontPage is supposed to be a
quick and dirty web solution with pre-hashed web objects and such to make a new web page (such as
counters, or
message boards).
The other component to the web system are the
FrontPage Server Extensions, an add-on to
IIS. This is HUGE for
IIS web developers on a
debugging (non-live) site, so that they can see the output of the code engines. Seeing an
http error code 500 spit out of your page every time does not aid in debugging at all. It allows you to publish directly to that web site, and have finer tuning on the publishing
mechanism (and you don't even need to do it from FrontPage). FrontPage server extensions are also available for
Apache. I use these for my ASP page
development, even though I loathe the
Office Family member
associated primarily with them.