FrontPage 2003 vs. Expression Web
There seems to have been quite a bit of confusion in FrontPage
circles over the introduction of Expression Web. Webmasters seem
concerned about whether older webs will be compatible and what changes
this new program will bring.
As you probably know, every software program has a product life cycle. Microsoft has already dropped support for FrontPage 2000 and 2002, and FrontPage 2003 mainstream support will end in 2009.
Rather than try to make much needed changes to yet another version of FrontPage, Expression Web was designed from the ground up. While you will find many similarities between Expression Web and FrontPage 2003, what goes on behind the scenes is vastly different.
Expression Web is not just a new, renamed FrontPage. It is a professional tool. Gone is the bloated code for which FrontPage was often criticized. Gone are the "web-bots" that wrote code proprietary to Internet Explorer. Expression Web not only helps you by writing valid XHTML by default, it helps you learn by highlighting (in code view) errors. This makes Expression Web a great learning tool.
Even if you are not quite ready to give up FrontPage 2003 for Expression Web, our new generation of templates are designed to the newest web standards. You will find the coding cleaner, W3C compliant, and well tested in several popular browsers. This ensures that our templates will work very well in both FrontPage 2003 and Expression Web.
So What's Different?
- Many of the old FrontPage components have been removed from Expression Web. You won't find photo galleries, themes, guestbook forms, navigation view, automatic page banners, or Word Art.
- Don't assume that if you build a web site using Expression Web that your code will automatically be valid and clean. You will get a great start, but need to learn how to get the best results.
- Do check you page code for both valid XHTML and CSS using the built in tools in Expression Web. Go to Tools > Compatibility Reports > CSS reports and the use the validation tools available at http://validator.w3.org/
- Expression web was designed to be backwards compatible. This means that FrontPage web sites imported into Expression Web will still work.
- Remember that there is a learning curve with any new program.