FrontPage’s Replacement: Expression

Microsoft has released beta 1 of the Microsoft Expression Web Designer, the follow-up to FrontPage. I’ve installed and played with it a little bit and here’s my initial reactions:

Microsoft Expression Web Designer beta 1

The interface is nice and easily understood after about five minutes of poking around. I especially like the ability to split the screen between code and WYSIWYG editing.

Microsoft Expression Web Designer beta 1 - 01

With Microsoft’s “we write good clean code now” push, a validator is included in Expression. The validator does allow you to choose which level of “compatibility” you would like to test against.

Microsoft Expression Web Designer beta 1 - 02

The list of validation errors appears below. In this example, since I was validating against XHTML 1.0 Transitional, it did tell me that the legacy FrontPage Webbot in my code may cause problems. Bravo!

Microsoft Expression Web Designer beta 1 - 03

The menu-based CSS editing will take me a bit of getting used to since I’m comfortable writing CSS by hand. I can see this being very useful to someone new to CSS.

Microsoft Expression Web Designer beta 1 - 04

The new “Optimize HTML” feature seems useful but I’ve not played with it yet.

Microsoft Expression Web Designer beta 1 - 05

Expression’s “Preview in Browser” feature is flexible. It auto-detects which browsers are on your computer and you can set up different preview types including multiple browsers in a specific resolution.

Microsoft Expression Web Designer beta 1 - 06

Expression still works with servers that have the FrontPage extensions installed but it doesn’t seem to have a built in FTP and/or SFTP client allowing me to easily access sites on non-FrontPage servers. (I’ve got just one site I work on that is still on a FrontPage server.) I’m not planning on moving from HTML-Kit to Expression until I see what the actual cost will be (or maybe if I get it for free as part of some Office upgrade). Overall though, it does seem to be leaps and bounds ahead FrontPage and Microsoft deserves kudos for this product.

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