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FrontPage Versions and Timeline
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November, 1995 - Vermeer FrontPage
Version 1.0

June, 1996 - Microsoft FrontPage
Version 1.1

October, 1996 - Microsoft FrontPage 97
(Version 2)

January, 1997 - Microsoft FrontPage 1.0 for Macintosh
(Version  2)

September, 1997 - Microsoft FrontPage Express 2.0
Note: Shipped with Internet Explorer 4.0

December, 1997 - Microsoft FrontPage 98
(Version 3)

March, 1999 - Microsoft FrontPage 2000
(Version 4)

June, 2001 - Microsoft FrontPage 2002
(Version 5 [≈10])

October, 2003 - Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003
(Version 6 [≈11])

Review: FrontPage 2003 is my favorite version of FrontPage. There's a great balance of powerful functionality and ease-of-use.
November, 2006 - Expression Web Designer 2007
and Office SharePoint Designer 2007
(Version 7 [≈12])
Note: Sadly, the "FrontPage" product has ceased to exist and has been
replaced by Expression Web Designer and Office SharePoint Designer


Review: After having used the beta versions of these programs, I was looking forward to their release versions with a great deal of anticipation. Having said that, now that I've used the release versions I can honestly say that I absolutely hate the way that these programs format their HTML code.

The ability to use normal HTML tags for formatting text has been removed from these two products in favor of using CSS almost everywhere. For example, when indenting a section of text, these two programs create a custom CSS class or an in-line style instead of using the <blockquote> tag like any other decent HTML editor would do. But it doesn't stop there, the more formatting options you apply, the more complex the page-level classes get, and there's no standardization across separate pages so there's no way to re-use code between different pages. This is just wrong, and it's really bad for those authors that like to cut & paste code between different pages.

In the end, there's some cool new ASP.NET stuff, but in my opinion the ability to write pages the way you want has been crippled, and that makes the program impossible for many serious developers to use.
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