DREAMWEAVER VS FRONTPAGE

FRONTPAGE REVIEW

“No real professional uses FrontPage.”

This is a common belief held by many “Internet professionals,” but is it really true?

Many FrontPage users face the overwhelming perception that if they use FrontPage, they can’t be a “real professional” — an attitude that I’ve always regarded as ludicrous. A “professional” can use FrontPage as one of the many weapons in his or her arsenal.

Make no mistake, though: FrontPage is a great application for newbies because it’s modeled after Microsoft Word, which is easy to use, and a program with which many, many people are familiar. So, when you open up FrontPage, you think “Hey, this is just like a Word Document! I can do this!”

The controls of Word and FrontPage are strikingly similar.

FrontPage is commonly known as a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. It’s a solid tool with a great deal of easy-to-use options and page elements that allow you to create a decent Website quickly and with minimal hassle. Sure, if you don’t have any design sense, you’re going to wind up with an ugly page — but that goes for every piece of design software you can buy. But FrontPage offers other functionality as well, including, for example, its very useful site management tools. We’ll talk about them a little later.

The Advantages

First I’d like to talk about a few of the small, neat things I see in FrontPage.

I really like the tabs that come up when you have more than one document open. In most of the other editors I’ve used, a new window is opened for each document, each taking up a little extra space on the Taskbar. But FrontPage’s single tab takes up the same amount of Taskbar space, no matter how many documents you have open. Plus, this makes it really easy to switch between documents.

Another great advantage is the way FrontPage allows you to jump from the actual editor, to the HTML code (that you can edit by hand), and a preview of what the page would like if it were online. You don’t have to open up a new browser window to preview a page, unless you choose to. This is all very handy. To give you an idea of how easy it is to change between views.

The Disadvantage

What’s the downside for FrontPage? The code it produces isn’t pretty, and won’t pass the standards for HTML/XHTML. This is, as you’d imagine, the major gripe most people have with FrontPage. However, the code works fine for most major and minor browsers out there at the moment.

If you happen to write your own code, you can turn code editing off so that FrontPage won’t touch it. If you want to get really technical (and I mean really), you can even set your own coding profile — FrontPage will then code the pages the way you tell it to.

An Added Bonus: Site Management

Included in FrontPage is a wealth of site management tools. These help you to plan and develop the structure of your Website, from navigation and subdirectories, to links and architecture. You can map an existing Website or create one from scratch.

You can even configure FrontPage to display Website traffic reports. Hate to FTP? FrontPage can be set to update a page on the Web automatically, right after you’ve changed it.

DREAMWEAVER REVIEW

Visual authoring with XML data

Integrate XML-based data, such as RSS feeds into web pages using a simple drag
and drop workflow. Jump to code view to customize the transformation, using improved
code hinting for XML and XSLT.

New, unified CSS panel

All the CSS functionality is consolidated into one panel set and enhanced to make
working with CSS easier and more productive. The new interface makes it easier
to see the cascade of styles applied to a specific element and easily identify
where attributes are defined. A property grid allows for quick edits.

CSS layout visualization

Apply visual aides at design time to outline CSS layout borders or color CSS layouts
to reveal complex nesting schemes and improve selection. Click on the CSS layout
for valuable Tooltips, such as ID and padding and margin and border settings.

Style rendering toolbar

View content the same way end-users will see it, no matter what the delivery mechanism,
with new support for CSS media types in Dreamweaver 8. Use the style rendering
toolbar to toggle to design view and see how it will look in print, on a handheld,
or on a screen.

CSS rendering improvements

Match how complex CSS layouts will render in most browsers, with substantial improvements
in design view accuracy. Dreamweaver now fully supports advanced CSS techniques,
such as overflow, pseudo-elements, and form elements.

Accessibility: Support for WCAG/W3C priority 2 checkpoints

In addition to the integrated accessibility evaluation tool for Section 508 and
WCAG Priority 1 checkpoints, Dreamweaver now supports both CSS and accessibility
with an updated evaluation tool that includes WCAG Priority 2 checkpoints.

Improved WebDAV

WebDAV in Dreamweaver 8 now supports digest authentication and SSL for secure
file transfer and offers improved connectivity with a wider array of servers.

Background file transfer

Stop waiting and keep working while Dreamweaver 8 uploads files to the server.
New functionality enables users to work with files in their local machine while
Dreamweaver communicates with the server.

Zoom

Get great control over design with zoom. Pan in and inspect an image or work with
a complex nested table layout. Zoom out to review how a page will look overall.

Guides

Compare the page layout to comps with pixel perfect accuracy using guides to measure
page layouts. Great visual feedback helps measure distances accurately and supports
intelligent snapping.

Coding toolbar

The new code toolbar surfaces common coding operations in a gutter bar along the
side of the coding surface. No more hunting through menus and panels to find code
snippets. New coding features include comment/uncomment.

Code collapse

Focus only on the code in use. Hide and expand blocks of code by selection or
by tag to stay organized.

Workspace layouts

Customize and save workspace configurations. Dreamweaver 8 ships with four different
configurations that are tailored to the needs of designers and coders. Pick and
choose, or easily build a custom workspace.

Tabbed documents for the Mac

New document tabs on Mac help simplify the user interface and make it easier to
select documents.

New starter pages

Get started with web design in a snap. Beautiful new layouts and designs allow
users to go from installation to full site in no time flat.

Improved site synchronize and check in / check out

Manage sites with increased reliability and confidence. Improved site synchronization
features help ensure that the file in use is the latest version. Prevent accidental
overwriting of others’ work with improved check-in/ check-out functionality
to track who is working on which files.

Compare files

Quickly compare files to identify what has changed, whether it is two local files,
a file on the local and remote, or two files on the remote server. Dreamweaver
8 now integrates with diff utilities on both the Mac and Windows platforms.

Paste special

Spend less time wrestling content from email and Microsoft Word into formats.
With new pasting options in Dreamweaver, retain all the source formatting created
in Microsoft Word, or just take the text and apply the CSS already attached to
the page.

Site relative references

Work seamlessly with server-side includes at design time and run time by ensuring
that references are relative to sites instead of local files.

Code editing improvements

Gain greater control over how the tool hints and completes tags to fit with your
coding style

Support for ColdFusion MX 7

Updated support for ColdFusion MX 7 includes new server behaviors and code hinting.
To match the code hinting and debugging with the correct version of ColdFusion,
Dreamweaver automatically detects the server version the first time the tool connects
to the site. The tight integration between Dreamweaver and ColdFusion allows users
to add and remove databases directly from the database and components panel in
Dreamweaver to show only CFCs defined in the current site—making navigating
CFCs a snap.

Support for PHP 5

Take advantage of updated support for PHP 5, including server behaviors and code
hinting.

OVERALL

if your going for a more CSS type site use dreamweaver while if your preferation is simplicity itself , go for frontpage.