If you choose to use Microsoft FrontPage 98 as your primary means of Web Creation and Management, you’ll finally live the easy and happy life of a designer and manager who can concentrate on content and well as concept without sweating niggly things like simple code mistakes or massive issues like the fast implementation of in-depth advanced programming tactics.
It’s all cool and æｓｔｈｅｔｉｃａｌ, but I remember Frontpage being completely unusable and full of WordArt-style gimmicks, generating trashy HTML code on the same level of complexity as HTML generated by Word. Probably properly viewable only in Internet Explorer.
Macromedia Dreamweaver, on the contrary, had really “professional” feel and allowed to make real websites for a long time. Maybe it’s still used today. Its UI is “photoshopish” and looks like it’s really intended for website designers and not dreamy salesmans like Frontpage and many other Microsoft products.
Macromedia anything. They were kicking all kinds of ass. More learning curve, though. FrontPage’s selling point was, like author says, it was extremely easy to use. They taught it to most people at a local school. Those that didn’t get HTML did get some or all of FrontPage’s basics.
Macromedia’s stuff was pretty incredible before Adobe bought them. Over the next decade they’d take Flash, an incredible tool that was very light weight (compared to Shockwave and Java) for vector art, programming, animation and slowly make it unwieldy and terrible.
Now we have so many games written in Flash that we won’t be able to ever play again after 2020 (unless you don’t care about security updates or people make inbrowser Flash-to-HTML5/JS players).
Macromedia is one of those things I think about when people making web apps tell me a chat app or banner has to use up a ton of CPU and memory. Things like the Deep Blue Sea website navigating parts of the sea vessel took up less space.
Adobe acquired Macromedia a few years back, and still publish Dreamweaver. I don’t know how the current versions compare to the late-90s versions, though.
Impressively, both of his domains which he links to as examples of the themes are still alive, owned by the author and serving more or less the same purpose. Although he’s no longer using the FrontPage 98 Artsy theme, sadly.
The “map” view (or whatever it was called) would actually be pretty nice to have today since static sites have come back into fashion and we use things like wikis that are intended to form “webs” of hyperlinked content. Funny how things like that are cyclical.
I imagine today’s version of Frontpage: semi-wysiwyg markdown editor, deployment to web hosting with git, jekyll for templating/theming engine, dialog to add analytics/trackers/ads/anti-adblockers/subscription popups, letsencrypt configuration wizard.
Of course, based on Electron and with front command-line tool.
But history took a different path…
Well, that’s where Squarespace and all the other website generators came in.
It’s all cool and æｓｔｈｅｔｉｃａｌ, but I remember Frontpage being completely unusable and full of WordArt-style gimmicks, generating trashy HTML code on the same level of complexity as HTML generated by Word. Probably properly viewable only in Internet Explorer.
Macromedia Dreamweaver, on the contrary, had really “professional” feel and allowed to make real websites for a long time. Maybe it’s still used today. Its UI is “photoshopish” and looks like it’s really intended for website designers and not dreamy salesmans like Frontpage and many other Microsoft products.
Macromedia anything. They were kicking all kinds of ass. More learning curve, though. FrontPage’s selling point was, like author says, it was extremely easy to use. They taught it to most people at a local school. Those that didn’t get HTML did get some or all of FrontPage’s basics.
Macromedia’s stuff was pretty incredible before Adobe bought them. Over the next decade they’d take Flash, an incredible tool that was very light weight (compared to Shockwave and Java) for vector art, programming, animation and slowly make it unwieldy and terrible.
Now we have so many games written in Flash that we won’t be able to ever play again after 2020 (unless you don’t care about security updates or people make inbrowser Flash-to-HTML5/JS players).
Macromedia is one of those things I think about when people making web apps tell me a chat app or banner has to use up a ton of CPU and memory. Things like the Deep Blue Sea website navigating parts of the sea vessel took up less space.
Adobe acquired Macromedia a few years back, and still publish Dreamweaver. I don’t know how the current versions compare to the late-90s versions, though.
Impressively, both of his domains which he links to as examples of the themes are still alive, owned by the author and serving more or less the same purpose. Although he’s no longer using the FrontPage 98 Artsy theme, sadly.
The “map” view (or whatever it was called) would actually be pretty nice to have today since static sites have come back into fashion and we use things like wikis that are intended to form “webs” of hyperlinked content. Funny how things like that are cyclical.
I imagine today’s version of Frontpage: semi-wysiwyg markdown editor, deployment to web hosting with git, jekyll for templating/theming engine, dialog to add analytics/trackers/ads/anti-adblockers/subscription popups, letsencrypt configuration wizard.
Of course, based on Electron and with
frontcommand-line tool.My first website was coded using Frontpage, maybe 97 or 98. I was 15 then.
Thanks for this nostalgia trip.
I’ve been reading a lobstersy book that explores precisely this area of web history: “Dot-Com Design: The Rise of a Usable, Social, Commercial Web” by Megan Sapnar Ankerson. It traces the creation of roles like “WebMaster” and the development of early web aesthetics. Recommended!