A Short History of FrontPage

If you are new to FrontPage (and this version will be bringing a lot of new users), a short history of FrontPage and its reputation in the Web design industry are in order.

Unlike the other Office products, Microsoft didn't write or design FrontPage but bought FrontPage from the software startup Vermeer Technologies in 1995. The original version of FrontPage introduced a then radical approach to content design and management that is still seen in the product today.

After the acquisition, Microsoft quickly launched its version of the product (in just a few months) with a lot of code from the old Vermeer version and only recently began to truly make the product its own. Because it was purchased from a third party and released so quickly, FrontPage carried a lot of programmatic baggage that finally seems to be eliminated from the program with this release.

TIP

If you want to read a truly fascinating book on the story behind Microsoft's purchase of FrontPage, I must recommend Charles H. Ferguson's High Stakes, No Prisoners: A Winner's Tale of Greed and Glory in the Internet Wars. FrontPage didn't come to Microsoft without a fight, and the cast of characters that made it all happen, and prevented other things from happening, makes for my favorite read from the dot-com gold rush that seems but a memory now.

FrontPage was, from the very beginning, a different kind of Web design product because it approached Web design from a management standpoint and saw things in terms of how the pages and content related and reacted to each other not just how the pages were made. It also attempted to eliminate a lot of the more complicated server-side issues in Web design with the FrontPage Extension part of the product. The FrontPage Extensions interacted with different Web servers without requiring the developer to have skills in that area, allowing developers to perform server-side tasks (such as sending form data to email, a database, or another file).

The combination of a holistic approach to Web design and the ability for server-side capabilities without programming encouraged many Web designers to embrace FrontPage as their product of choice.

In order to maintain and manage the site on a server-wide basis, FrontPage previously edited Web page code in such a way that often frustrated users. This is no longer a problem because the HTML produced by FrontPage 2003 is as "clean" as can be and will satisfy even the most steadfast of the clean code club.