There are two major WYSIWYG(What You See Is What YouGet) editors available for beginners. These are: MicrosoftFrontPage and Macromedia Dreamweaver. So the questionis which one is better?
This article is not intended to humiliate Dreamweaveror FrontPage editors. I just attempted to analyze bothprograms from different points, based on Internet research,experience of other users and my years of html codingexperience.
To say honest I am not the fan both of them. In ourproduction we regularly use AceHtmlPro but the factis that many of our customers DO use either FrontPageor Dreamweaver and that's the reason our employee haveto be familiar with both. Writing the article I havetalked to our stuff and did some research about botheditors and I came up with the facts I'd like to sharewith you.
Pluses and minuses of MS FrontPage:
 Microsoft FrontPage Software |
1. FrontPage as all Microsoft product has somany templates and ready to use solutions that youcannot admit it is easier for beginner to start usingFrontPage to build his first website. You can createsimple website personal or business with several clicksand all you will need to do next is to enter your textand pictures instead of used by FrontPage by default.
2. The good news is FrontPage html pages lookexactly as they appear in MS Explorer and the bad newsis that they look perfect ONLY in MS Explorer. Howeveryou may program FrontPage to get rid of nasty tagsbut I believe it requires some hand coding to adjustpages to Netscape or Opera. Another good news for FrontPageusers: about 93% of all internet clients use MS Explorer5 and higher.
3. As Microsoft application FrontPage is betterwith ASP pages, which are standard for Windows basedhosting and windows based programming.
4. MS FrontPage perfectly interacts with otherMS Office products. For example you can easily cutand paste some chart from MS Excel into FrontPage workingarea.
5. By default MS FrontPage uses table withthe fixed width and sometimes it can be a problem tomake it display tables with percentage width.
Pluses and minuses of Macromedia Dreamweaver:
 Dreamweaver Software |
1. You can build your own templates and usethem to edit hundreds of pages of your website withone single click. Although Dreamweaver adds some commenttags to html file to distinguish editable and non-editableareas and I read in one forum that people experiencesome troubles applying template to more then 700 pagesas they ran out of memory but I had never chance totest that.
2. Pages done with Dreamweaver usually haveless trash in coding. They look almost perfect withNetscape, Opera and MS Explorer.
3. Dreamweaver doing amazing thing with SSIfiles and other server side include technology. Phpcode looks much nicer however with ASP scripts FrontPagestill better.
4. Dreamweaver is much better interacts withother macromedia products.
5. Both editors in most cases display CSS (CascadingStyle Sheets) correctly. But if you enter style attributetwice in Dreamweaver for <td> it will definitelyruin your page and you will be able preview your pagepartly before this error. FrontPage however handlessuch mistakes easily.
There are many others pluses and minuses in both editorsif I wrote about al of them I should probably starta book rather then single article, but those I havemention I heard most about.
My idea is that MS FrontPage is ideal for beginnersas it provides so much help and templates, then youshould move to Dreamweaver when you feel yourself morecomfortable with the html code and finally, if youare serious about web design, you should reach thehand coding level as it still best way for coding pages.It gives you the freedom of using tags and styles,as you want them to use. Do not forget however validateyou hand coding, or code generated with FrontPage orDreamweaver. You will be surprised if you knew howmany errors produced during coding starting from brokenlinks to invalid tag attributes.
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