What Is a Web Component?

FrontPage includes many Web components that you can use to make your site more dynamic and interactive. This book gives you the information that you need to be very productive with the Web components included with FrontPage. Whether it's the FrontPage Photo Gallery or the Include Page component, they all have one thing in common. They have a dialog in which you configure settings, and they insert code into your Web page when you click OK. They also allow you to easily reconfigure them by double-clicking on them inside your page to bring up their dialog box again. That's a Web component.

FrontPage also ships with several special Web components such as the MSNBC Components, the Expedia Components, and the MSN Components. These are special components because they don't work exactly like the rest of FrontPage's components. All these components rely on information that changes frequently, and they also feed off Internet Web sites with URLs that might change over time. Take the Expedia Link to a map component shown in Figure D.1. This component allows you to create a link on your Web site that links to a map based on the address information you provide to the component. Now suppose that the URL that Expedia uses for maps changes. If this were a regular Web component, the only way for your component to continue working would be for Microsoft to release a patch to FrontPage to update the URL in the component. That's not a very efficient way to address the problem.

Figure D.1. The Expedia Link to a map component relies on the URL to the map link being up-to-date.

Microsoft realized this dilemma early on and built a new Web component system into FrontPage starting with FrontPage 2002, and fortunately for us, Microsoft built it so that users of FrontPage can take advantage of it to easily create their own Web components.

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For sample Web components and documentation, download the FrontPage Software Developer's Kit from http://fpsdk.frontpagelink.com.

There are two types of Web components those that display a dialog box to the user and insert code based on settings the user specifies in the dialog box, and those that simply insert code into the page without any dialog boxes. Microsoft calls components that rely on dialogs interactive components and those that don't rely on dialogs noninteractive components.

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Web components are created completely at design-time. Therefore, unlike FrontPage's included browse-time components (such as the Hit Counter), they can be used on ASP and ASP.NET pages as well as HTML pages.