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Microsoft Expression vs. Dreamweaver
An anonymous reader writes "Informit has a quick look at Microsoft's Expression suite consisting of Graphic Designer, Interactive Designer, and Web Designer in comparison to Dreamweaver. It seems that Microsoft got tired of relying on FrontPage and is actually going after professionals. From the article: 'What designers might not realize is that Microsoft finally drank the Kool-Aid. The Expression Web Designer application walks the Web standards walk. One caution: Web Designer currently only supports ASP.NET. Microsoft built the ASP.NET platform; it isn't a surprise that Expression Web Designer was designed to support that platform. This is obviously a drawback for those designers who work with PHP, JSP, and other non-ASP.NET platforms, making it difficult for Microsoft to expand its reach beyond the ASP.NET users.'"
It seems that Microsoft got tired of relying on FrontPage and is actually going after professionals. ... This is obviously a drawback for those designers who work with PHP, JSP, and other non-ASP.NET platforms
Yeah, it really sounds like they're going after professionals. (rolleyes)
Push Button, Receive Bacon
I think what this is designed to do is ensure that other Open (or even not so open) standards are used in decreasing frequency as MS pushes people to this package that's designed to work with their server platforms. After all, if you are running a MS web server on Windows Server 2### or XP Pro, designing pages with this is "ideal", so why spend the time using/learning/running PHP/JSP/etc when you have an all in one app to integrate it all for you?
My opinion is its another attempt by MS to leverage their market share (in installed servers) to gain a bigger foothold in other areas (ie: kill PHP/JSP/etc).
-Robert
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
So in other words, it's completely useless to many of us web developers, and isn't directly comparable with Dreamweaver? Thought so.
She's built like a steak house, but she handles like a bistro....
"The Expression Web Designer application walks the Web standards walk. One caution: Web Designer currently only supports ASP.NET."
Aren't these two statements sort of, you know, contradictory?
Look, I know it's de rigeur for us to trash Microsoft and talk about "MS Fanboys" and all that - but even just reading this summary, it's obvious that 1) MS really HASN'T drank the Koolaid; and 2) This really isn't a professional tool by anyone's standards except some fanboys who don't know any better. It's just a repackaging of FrontPage - they're prettied it up and maybe added a few meaningless tweaks.
What's the old saying... you can put lipstick on a pig, but in the end it's still a pig.
#DeleteChrome
...how clean is the code from Microsoft's product. I've used both FrontPage and Dreamweaver and I can tell you that most of the time Dreamweaver produces some pretty clean HTML etc. Frontpage not so much.
If the code is clean enough I could run it on my Linux Apache server using mono.
Better not hold my breath...
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Who needs Expression? I have a text editor.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
I'm all for standards, but are you saying you don't check to see if your site works with the #1 web browser?
It's not a drawback for developers, it's a limitation for Microsoft.
Why would any (sane) web application developer want to pay for and use a windows-only IDE, when you can develop on a free operating system, with free software, and do (virtually) anything you want with the source code??
As a perl/php web application developer, and someone who sometimes helps HR interview/test candidates to see where their technical skills and abilities are... I wouldn't recommend hiring someone who only uses IDE's such as dreamweaver, simply because they generally lack programming and software-design skills.
I might recommend them for a Web 'Designer' position, as they may be great at making graphical interfaces, but Web (GUI) Designers should not be confused with Web Application Developers, and in an assembly-line process they should never be exposed to the server-side source code.
Another drawback of using IDEs such as Dreamweaver in an assembly-line web application development environment, is that there is always a poor soul who has to clean-up all the nasty WYSIWYG-generated HTML code from the IDE. This is can sometimes be a huge set-back for resources and time allocation.
It's simply counter-productive.
Since most Web Designers who use IDEs only view from the 'Design' view, they generally don't realize how much sloppy code is being generated, or how to clean it up. (not all, but the majority of the mass)
the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
Where's the contradiction? ASP is just a server-side scripting language. W3C specifications describe what the HTML and CSS is supposed to look like once it reaches the brower. It would be absurd for them to specify where that markup comes from!
And users would just say "Fuck you" to said site and move on to the next one. I know I do when a site tells me to bugger off because I'm using Opera.
The code will be as good as the support in their browser. See how this stacks up in a Browser comparison
I doubt it.
When people go to little blogs all day and see that some sites don't like IE, but then they go to their bank's website and it doesn't care... And they go to major news corporation sites and those sites don't care... And then they go car shopping and Ford's website doesn't care... do you get where I'm going with this? People are more likely to respect the opinion of major sites with millions of dollars invested in them (wellsfargo.com, etc.) than small company sites or blogs. The corporations aren't going to put out non-IE-compliant sites because IE has huge marketshare and corporations are more interested in customer-service than taking philosophical stands.
Personally I can't stand the "this site is better in browser X" notices because, in my opinion, a web designer's job is to design web pages that work for the majority of visitors. Too many "designers" forget that they are designing the pages for the visitors, not for themselves. As a visitor to a webpage, I don't care what browser the designer thinks I should be using, I just want the page to work. If I visit it in IE and the page breaks, I feel it is partly IE's fault for not making things easier for designers but also the designer's fault for not realizing that "going the extra mile" would've made the site experience better. Every site I design is designed to be standards compliant and then I include a few minor hacks to get IE to display correctly. I don't feel I've done my job properly until the site looks/operates nearly identical in IE (6 & 7), Firefox, Opera (8 & 9), and Safari. I don't have the time to test every browser known to man, but I figure those browsers cover the vast majority of visitors. Yes, it would be much easier to just code it to be standards-compliant and not give a shit about how it displays in various browsers, but that's not good design.
Well, if you want to focus to writing for the largest installed software base, with the largest company on the planet.. Lots of money to be made there, dont see much of a long term drawback for the average coder.
Professional, is a relative term.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Did you really expect Microsoft to build a Web Designer that didn't target their platform? Expressions is part of Visual Studio - it was unveiled at Professional Developers Conference 2005. Of course it's going to target ASP.NET - that's the web development language for Visual Studio .NET.
What I don't understand is why anyone would think they would do anything different? You may think the "right" way to make software like this is to target multiple platforms - but that doesn't make it the right way. Microsoft does not build software that way. Arguably they have proven that their way is more "right" - by the Heinlein test that it is the way that is most succesful. They've built a multinational corporate entity, producing software that runs the vast majority of the world's computing equipment, and they built this empire by writing software that was meant to work well together - and didn't really care how well it worked with other software.
They've made great strides in this area lately, showing a willingness to support alternative standards and open specifications, and even recognizing that interoperability is a value proposition to their customers - but I think it's idealistic dreaming at best to hope they would build a development tool for a competing platform.
I don't do PHP, Perl, CGI, J2EE or any of the "slashdot-approved" server-side scripting languages. I don't really care if my development environment supports any of them. I've tried them all, and had paying customers for most, and honestly prefer ASP.NET. I'm not trying to start an argument about which is better - merely stating my opinion. As such, Expressions is the perfect web designer for me, and I don't think anyone doing ASP.NET development would argue with that, if all you want to do in the world is ASP.NET development, then Expressions is clearly superior to any 3rd party tool - and no secret why, Microsoft has the expertise in their own API, and most likely a deeper understanding than is available in public documentation.
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
I just read all the comments on this story. Even the reall stupid ones that people posted anonymously.
Here's a personal anecdote:
I was something like, maybe 16-17 when Frontpage came out. I tried it out, thought it was pretty cool.... except.. why doesn't that table justify properly? And, WTF is the deal with inconsistant fonts when I click the little button..?
So, fast forward five or six years, and now I'm a freelancer, doing all kinds of different stuff. About two years ago, I forgot to close my sunroof, and my carbon paper book that I'd used for invoicing basically melted into my passenger seat. Pretty, as you can imagine.
So, I said to myself, "I should really put together some kind of web-based thingamajig to take care of that shit for me."
Since I'm not a pro web guy, I muddled around with FP, Dreamweaver, Bluefish, etc. Fucking frustrating. Finally, I bit the bullet and spent about two months reading as much from w3schools.com and php.net as I could handle. For windows, I started using Crimson Editor (www.crimsoneditor.com) and Jed in Linux.
And, you know what? The *learning* was the real prize of that project-- and the top-notch custom built invoicing system was just icing. Yes, it took a long time, and yes, I did some dumb stuff (like the thousand-line nested if statement that a buddy rewrote to five lines). Yes, it's tedious to look up code examples and documentation. But, I know for a fact that had I been using tools like Dreamweaver, Frontpage, and whatever else you might throw at something like this, it would never have gotten done, I'd still be using that damn carbon book, and I wouldn't have learned an entirely new set of skills to aid my business.
(Though, for the record, I wouldn't be a professional web designer if my life depended on it. I've had so many customers try to get those guys to do P = NP problems that it's lost its hilarity.)
Hmm.. since most of MS products are COM or .NET based, and most export some type of API, even if its only IUnknown. The only limitation seems to be someone mapping PHP functions to COM or .NET objects. In fact, just overlay the existing functions and take control of the interface, use it as a shell for designing other Web languages. Surely there are a few ASP only features.. why not grey them out or disable them, or repurpose them for Wikipedia or the like. Its only a thought, but the old model seems to be recurring at a suprising rate in Microsoft products, like they are busy teaching older Microsoft methodologies than coming up with new ones. Maybe its a crunch in retirees or Startup groupees, and they need to train new blood. At least that gives a base from which to march forward... with existing product methods.
Outsourcing seems to have the same bottleneck. To outsource you must catch the Genie in the bottle and ship him overseas, and hope he works his magic in a foreign land. Problem there could be that that culture rejects it like the human body produces antibodies to fight off an infection. Some cultures are at various times in history are Xenophobic, if only at the government level. Only experiments however can tell, or test the waters.
It surprises me how marketing demonstrates time and time again the things we learn in kindergarten seem to attract customers, honesty, integrity, equality.. but when we grow up we're taught a variation of game theory at the business level.. do on to others before they do on to you.. and we're exporting that in many areas.
If we ignored game theory for a moment, it seems people always age and always retire, and at the edges, there is a real honest desire to train future replacements, and transfer the knowledge so that it doesn't get lost.. its not always the case.. sometimes something might replace the old technology-wise. But the real loss leads to reduced profits and expensive R&D all over again for the next generation. Imagine if Archimedes differential calculus had not been lost for 2000 years? What kind of profits could have come out of that?