Front Page

["Walker, Arlen P" <Arlen -dot- P -dot- Walker -at- JCI -dot- COM>]

Just an advisory. While looking for information on Web development
environments I ran across some interesting information on Front Page. I
had worked with it before, and knew that it was focused on producing
proprietary pages, but I hadn't realized the full extent.

Apparently a full-time designer wrote a letter to the DOJ over this, and
copied Ric Ford on it. (Background: Ric Ford is a former Apple employee
who runs a site, Macintouch, which publishes as much information as
possible directly relating to Macintoshes, both good news and bad news.
He's often the first to report problems and the first to find solutions or
workarounds for them. Highly recommended for any Mac user, quite a bit
less useful for anyone else.)

Anyway, the letter is at http://www.macintouch.com/msfrontpage.html and it
contends that Front Page alters your HTML so that it can only be served up
by MS servers, and in many cases alters the HTML itself so that it can
only be edited by FrantPage (the letter talks specifically about how it
modifes image maps to be Front page specific). There have already been a
number of followups posted.

This information is less useful to "captive" content developers (of which
I'm one, at least in my day job) as we will most likely have a well-
defined development environment for our projects. But this could cause a
great deal of trouble for contractors and other independents, who rely on
their tools to work in a much wider range of environments.


Have fun,
Arlen
Chief Managing Director In Charge, Department of Redundancy Department
DNRC 224

Arlen -dot- P -dot- Walker -at- JCI -dot- Com
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