Nowhere said:
So basically HTML - Kit (YMMV) is the best free one. And is better than
Frontpage...Thanks.
Heh, well, yes and no
Firstly: "YMMV" means "Your Milage May Vary" which is Internet talk for
"it's down to personal opinion".
Microsoft Frontpage, in all honesty, is "ok". It has 3 main problems:
1) It is designed for Internet Explorer. Most people on the WWWeb use
Microsoft Internet Explorer, something like 80% or 90%. However, that's
out of about 500,000,000 (5 hundred million) people. Internet Explorer
is a web browser. Have you heard of Netscape Navigator? Opera? Mozilla
Firebird/FireFox? These are like Internet explorer, in that they are
programs designed to view websites.
There is a "standard" for designing websites. Sites are made in a
language called HTML. Imagine the English Language. Originally, only
English people spoke it. Now, Americans, Australians, New Zealanders,
Canadians etc all speak it, but all very differently. 99% of it is the
same but the Americans say "trash" whilst the English say "Rubbish".
Australians say "Dexters" and the English say "Felt Tip Pens". The
English say "Filofax" whilst the New Zealanders say "Personal
Organiser". HTML and web browsers are the same. There's one base
language called "HTML 4.01". Internet explorer uses this 99% of the
time, but deviates from it every so often with it's own versions of
tags. Netscape Navigator deviates a bit with it's own unique bits and
bobs. For example, the "<blink>" tag can be used in NS whilst IE won't
recognise it etc. FireFox and Opera conform to the HTML standard pretty
much 99.9999999% if not 100%.
Frontpage, designed by Microsoft, puts in tags and coding that will ONLY
work on Internet Explorer. Soemtimes a page rendered in Frontpage wont
even work on Netscape or Firefox.
So whilst Frontpage will make a page that 90% of the web users can see,
that means out of the 500,000,000 people on web, 50,000,000 (50 million)
people might not be able to see it.
2) It creates pages for "Microsoft Only" servers. HEard of Windows?
Heard of Linux? The two things do the same thing - they run a computer,
but they do it in different ways. Some web hosters use the microsoft web
server called "Internet Information Services" (IIS). Some use Apache.
For Linux, Apache is used quite a bit. Apple Macintosh servers also have
their own thing...
The advanved Frontpage features such as the "search" coding will ONLY
work on a server specifically designed for Frontpage, such as IIS.
Apache can't make these features work. So if you pick a web host who
uses Apache or something simlar, and that's probably about 30-50% of
them, then your page and time is all wasted.
3) It "decides" for you. You use FP like you do Microsoft Word - you
type your stuff, highlight it, make it bold etc - but FP decides how it
does this, not you. However, all editors have this problem.
The best way to make a site is to learn HTML yourself. Failing that, get
something like Dreamweaver, or at least a program that will create 100%
(or as close as) HTML 4.01 coding - anything geared towards individual
browsers will be useless to upto 50 million people.
I personally use Notepad since it lets me controll my code completely,
not adding things I don't want, and at the end of the day, if the site
doesn't work I can work out why.
I hope this helps you
--
Quiet, Pinky; I'm pondering.
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