Updated 5-25-97
Updated 5-25-97
ISSN 1068-9109
April 1997 Contents
Master Table of Contents
FrontPage 97
review by Dana Trout, GDTPUG
FrontPage 97 (FP97) is a great tool. It greatly helps those who do not know how to build a web site, but it greatly impedes those who do and who use sophisticated HTML coding to get the appearance they want.
FP97's manual claims it has an HTML editing mode for those special tweaks, and it does. The only problem is that the editor lets you make the changes (good) and then fixes everything up the way it believes it should be when you exit the editor (bad).
So let's look at FP97 as viewed by the intended audience -- people who want to do a web site (a linked set of web pages) and get something on the net that looks reasonable, works pretty well, and is relatively transparent to use.
FP97 has a set of web-bots and wizards to get you going quickly. When you
first start it up it shows a dialog box which lets you choose what you last
worked on, create a new site, import an existing site (Yea! A way of using
this tool to fix up your first unsatisfactory efforts!), and so on, as shown
in the following figure.
I imported the GDTPUG web site so I could use FP97 to update it and add
some new features. The FP97 Explorer lets you view a site in two
different ways: a hyperlink view, which lets you see what pages link to
and are linked by the current page, and a folder view, which is very
similar in appearance to Windows Explorer and shows you the files,
folders, dates, and other info.
The hyperlink view shown here is kind of interesting. You notice that the "All Hyperlinks" panel on the left shows the titles of the pages (not their file names), and uses a house icon to identify the main entry page (which is often the home page). Below the home page title are the titles of pages that it links to. The "Hyperlinks for ..." panel on the right displays the highlighted web page in the center (in this case, the "Goleta DeskTop Publishing UG Home Page"), all the pages that link to it are to the left, and all the pages it links to are to the right. There is a lot of duplication, because I have set up almost all pages to link back to the home page.
The FP97 Editor works on just a page at a time and is largely WYSIWYG. Actually, a better description is WYGIWYS (What You Get Is What You See), because it will not let you do some things it considers illegal. This is wonderful for all the unintentional errors that seem to creep in, but is a real pain when you and FP97 have a disagreement about what is legal -- FP97 always forces you to obey its rules.
The page editor is fairly easy to use -- you can type in the text or import it from a file, you can apply text attributes, paragraph styles (like heading, center, and bulleted list), and import graphics. FP97 is smart enough to convert images from WMF or BMP to the web standards of GIF or JPEG (it automatically selects GIF if the image has 256 colors or less, otherwise it uses JPEG). No, it doesn't do a lot of the little tweaking and fillips that make images "just so", but it does get them into an acceptable form so that when you actually put your web site out there for all to see they don't see glaring errors.
I do have a few bones to pick with Microsoft, though. If you use the Bold tool (the big B on the toolbar) or Ctrl-B the editor flags the text with the logical tag "Strong" instead of flagging it with the physical tag of "bold". Unfortunately, not all browsers understand "Strong", fewer, in fact, than understand the "bold" tag. Weirdly enough, if you instead go to the menu and choose Format/Font/Special Styles and select "bold" you actually get the bold tag that you expected in the first place. But it's such a pain to get to that this is an unsatisfactory solution. Fortunately, this is one place where the HTML editor does not fight you -- if you tag something with the bold tag it won't replace it with "strong", however that's not of much help because the editor has no search-and-replace function. (How anyone could write an editor with no search function is beyond me -- even Notepad has had this capability for many years, and it's not much of an editor.)
FP97 does have some very powerful and nice features. One that really caught my eye is that the FP Explorer lets you move files around to different folders and it will automatically update all the links in the pages. This feature is especially useful as your web site grows and you keep adding more and more pages and images, and then decide that you need to put things in different directories so that no one directory gets too many items (the server doesn't care, but when you do a directory list over a modem, you quickly see that you want to limit the number of files in a directory). FP97 also has a nice way of synchronizing the files on the web server with what you have on your computer. This is useful because it means that only the changed files get copied (especially nice when you are using a modem) and it also lets more than one person work on the web site.
FP97 also has some add-ons that spiff up your site if the web server has the FrontPage extensions (not all ISPs do, and before you castigate them too harshly, remember Microsoft's record for web security is absolutely stunning, but not in the good sense of the phrase). One of the extensions lets you add a text search engine, so whoever is looking at your site can search for keywords or phrases. Another lets you specify boilerplate that is added to the pages, which is helpful for the footer with address, email, and contact person info. Just change the one instance in the boilerplate and you don't have to mess with updating 2 or 3 zillion pages.
So what do I think? If I could figure out how to keep FP97 from fixing my pages that ain't broke, I would use it. But the time spent undoing FP97's fixes pretty well negates the other savings for me. I'll keep it around for a little longer, but whenever I need disk space it's the first to go. But for several of my friends who don't know HTML and don't want to, FP97 is a useful solution. Unlike some of the other web page editors, it tries to solve more of the overall problem of not only creating the pages, but linking them and then uploading them to the web server (usually an ISP like Silicon Beach or Impulse Net). And it does all of that pretty well.
If you do get FP97, also get a good book as well -- the manual is abbreviated and incomplete. One book that I like is "Web Publishing with FrontPage 97" by Matthews and published by Osborne/McGraw-Hill ($30 ISBN 0-07-882312-9). This book includes important information about choosing page styles and ancillary functions that work well with various versions of the NetScape browser, while Microsoft's manual doesn't even deign to address the issue. And the book gives a much more complete run-down of FP97's features, how to use them, and when you want to use them.
April 1997 Contents
Master Table of Contents
Quick Reviews by Dana Trout, GDTPUG
HTML for the World Wide Web, 2nd Edition Elizabeth Castro, author
This is an update of one of my favorite reference books. One of Peachpit's Visual Quickstart Guide series, this thin, approachable book takes you through the basics of HTML. It is laid out as a series of tasks, each taking a page or two, so you can quickly find the topic of interest and learn it. The organization is better than most tutorial guides, most of the examples are complete enough to really learn the topic, and the book is inexpensive at $18 list price. The 2nd edition is half again the length of the first, and it includes HTML ver 3.2 tags, as well as all the tags used by Netscape Navigator 3 and Microsoft Internet Explorer 3, including tables, frames, forms, and multimedia.
Even if you use a web page publisher like Front Page, you will find this book a useful source of information that which lets you tweak the code to make the page do what you want. Buy it, read it, and use it -- what more can I say?
$17.95 ISBN 0-201-68862-X
Peachpit Press 800 283-9444
Click here to go to Peachpit's web pages
April 1997 Contents
Master Table of Contents
JavaScript for the World Wide Web
Ted Gesing & Jeremy Schneider, authors
Yet another useful book in Peachpit's Visual Quickstart Guide series, this book focusses on JavaScript (and which Microsoft dubs JScript in Internet Explorer 3). Like HTML for the WWW, this book consists of a series of one and two page examples, complete with screen shots. Unfortunately, the organization is not quite as good as HTML for the WWW, and I have found a few errors. But still, this is one of the best books on JavaScript I have seen. If you have any interest in creating live pages that are constructed on the fly and customized to the reader's needs, the clarity and low cost of this book make it a must-buy.
$17.95 ISBN 0-201-68814-X
Peachpit Press 800 283-9444
Click here to go to Peachpit's web pages
April 1997 Contents
Master Table of Contents
Elements of Web Design
Darcy DiNucci with Maria Giudice & Lynne Stiles, authors
This book suffers from a lack of focus. Sometimes it tries to address the graphics arts issues of making good-looking pages, sometimes it tries to be an advertising vehicle for the creatives whose work is shown as examples, and sometimes it tries to teach you how to write HTML. Even though I know HTML I find the author's presentation of HTML constructs to be incomplete, misleading, and ambiguous. So don't look to this book as a way to learn HTML.
The comments about good page and overall web site design are appropriate, but I think this book offers too little for its $40 price. You can get great coaching on web site and page design on the Web itself, and if you see a site you like, try to analyze why you like it and incorporate those elements into your own.
$39.95 ISBN 0-201-88594-8
Peachpit Press 800 283-9444
Click here to go to Peachpit's web pages
April 1997 Contents
Master Table of Contents
Dan Gookin's Web Wambooli
The subtitle is "Taming the World Wide Web", but this book is really designed to be used once by a "newbie" to set up his/her browser, tour (surf) the Web, do a little email, select newsgroups, and participate in mailing lists. Unfortunately, Dan chooses the hard way to install Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE) and complains about it all the way, so if you are planning to use MSIE, ignore this book. His explanation of Netscape is much better.
I found this book to be frustrating, charming, and disconcerting by turns. Dan tries to leaven the text with humor, which helps keep the reader's interest. He also lards the book with tips that stand out visually so you read them before you do something you wish you hadn't. But sometimes he just gets things wrong or leaves you with incomplete information and I consider that to be a serious failing in a book that is meant to be used only once as a mentor to get you started. It doesn't help that this book costs $23 for one use, while the "Visual Quickstart" series cost $18 and will be used over and over.
$22.95 ISBN 0-201-88597-2
Peachpit Press 800 283-9444
Click here to go to Peachpit's web pages
April 1997 Contents
Master Table of Contents