Microsoft Expression

Our intranet has tons of documents published by a dozen or so different business groups. A good portion of those documents are web pages that have been thrown together assembled in FrontPage and published. Maintenance of those documents fall on the webmaster so when necessary,I need to go in and update them accordingly. This is a terrible,terrible job.

FrontPage writes some of the most awful code I’ve ever seen in my entire life. It even writes some code I’ve never seen in my entire life,like the <big> tag. Where did that come from? I’ve been doing this for a long time and I’ve only ever seen it in FrontPage code.

The FrontPag- generated documents are usually so bloated that I can’t even do a simple find on the text I’m looking to modify because it’s broken up by nested or empty tags. If just looking at the code doesn’t immediately suck out my will to live and send me into sinking depression,I’ll usually try to clean it up and simplify. It’s so bad that the other day I literally replaced about 900 lines of HTML (yes,HTML) with about 100 lines of semantic,standards-based XHTML and CSS. Yeah me!

That’s why it makes me happy to introduce Expression,the new FrontPage from Microsoft. That’s right,I’ve read that FrontPage is being replaced by Expression which supposedly writes valid Strict and Transitional HTML and XHTML,has better support for CSS,and will even validate accessibility if you so desire (and you should).

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