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.'"

Comments

hmmm

[macadamia_harold]

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)

Re:hmmm

[foniksonik]

As a professional I can follow up on this remark. "Whatever tool fits the job." MS in some cases is best but rarely. Most often is is a LAMP platform or LAPP platform unless the requirements dictate a more serious DB, DB2 or Oracle fit the bill in which case it is a LAOJ (Linux, Apache, Oracle and JSP) solution.

Again, rarely, rarely is it ever a MS, IIS, MSSQL, .NET solution (MIM.N for those in the know)..... simply because those systems/apps don't provide anything substantially better than the license free options (dependent on whether the client has ignorantly already paid for them, in which case they are fine solutions).

Re:hmmm

[ClosedSource]

"Serves them right... The problem is that there really are plenty of Microsoft trained drones out there who have absolutely no idea what exists outside of Microsoft's nice soft world for dummies, and no interest in learning anything ourside of Microsoft either."

My idea of a "dummy" is someone who doesn't use every advantage to get it done better, faster and cheaper because they fear they might be doing it the "soft" way. You can't live on programming "manliness".

If you think non-MS tools achieve that goal better, more power to you. But if those non-MS tools start looking "soft" someday, don't let that scare you from using them unless you find a more effective alternative.

Re:hmmm

[guibaby]

Umm....I can program in perl, C++, TSQL, and C#. I do 99% of my programming in C#/TSQL/ASP.NET. The reason is simple. It is the quickest way to get the job done. I like C# so much, that if I were going to do UNIX work (and I am qualified to), I would probably use mono. I enjoy bashing microsoft as much as the next guy, but they do some things right.

Re:hmmm

[Fulcrum of Evil]

The problem is this: if you use MS tech, they would prefer that you use only MS tech, to the point that interop is often neglected. MS tools may work for one off solutions, but they limit you to MS tech for the future, unless you want to spend a lot of effort to change.

Difficult? For what?

[RobertM1968]

"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.'"

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

Re:Difficult? For what?

[mdhoover]

Most likely it is there to keep their current fanclub happy in an attempt to try to stop the developer bleed off to JSP/PHP/etc.

Re:Difficult? For what?

[mkiwi]

I worked this summer in an all-MS company. I left it using PHP, MySQL, and Apache.

Businesses have this "comfort" mindset that if it is MS software, it will integrate ok. They won't be 5 years down the road saying, "I wish we had done it the other way."
The company I worked for does just under $100M USD per year, so they are not especially small, but also not especially large. MS's main selling point is that a business like that can use MS products because they integrate everything together. There were fears about going onto other platforms because you might (oh my god!) have to hire an employee who knows how to run an enterprise-class software operation. This costs lots of $$ and people who can do that are few and far between.

ASP.NET was brought alone to keep developers in these mid-sized corporations from going to technoligies like JSP, servlets, etc. The problem is no one at the company wants to hire anyone who knows how to do either the open source or windows. It's a catch-22: Can't get the nice customer-integrated website because we don't know Java or C#, but we are taking an awful risk if we hire several people at 70K-120K per year to get this thing for us.

Thus Microsoft has a vast untapped user base that they are trying to persuade to businesses hire those software engineers who can write the killer apps for the company. ASP.NET was the MS answer to JSP, but what MS didn't realize when they spend hundreds of millions of dollars developing .NET that companies like the one I worked for are too small to hire a dedicated Java or C# programmer for web programming. I don't think they're trying to kill JSP- they will never succeed in doing that. Java has many advantages over C# and large corporations that run in heterogenious environments are going to choose Java.

So, with untapped user base = untapped money for MS. They saw a "hole" in their solution for businesses when JSP came out, and they are trying to plug it right now.

So In Other Words

[colonslashslash]

Designer currently only supports ASP.NET. Microsoft built the ASP.NET platform...

So in other words, it's completely useless to many of us web developers, and isn't directly comparable with Dreamweaver? Thought so.

Re:So In Other Words

[colonslashslash]

Duplicating functionality that is already in Dreamweaver at the expense of an additonal license fee? What's the point?

Seems like this would be akin to having Adobe Swiss Army Knife and then going out and paying for Microsoft © Spork © ® XP © Pro Corporate Ultimate Extended EULA Edition. ;)

Re:So In Other Words

[Threni]

> I can't understand why people still develop software for Windows. People who do will have one of
> two futures: either Microsoft will buy them, or Microsoft will come out with a competing product
> and put them out of business. It's just crazy.

I get paid to develop software for Windows. I do this because ~everyone uses Windows. There are millions of applications out there, and probably tens of thousands of companies creating them; there's only a tiny chance that a fraction of those will be bought by or competed against by Microsoft. You simply don't know what you're talking about.

Other browsers?

[debilo]

"Walking the web standards walk" sounds nice at first, but Microsoft has a history of creating rather varying definitions of standard compliance that often didn't relate to web designers' own experiences. I skimmed the article, but didn't see a comparison of how well the code is supported in non-IE browsers.

Standards accepted, standard development tools, no

[notnAP]

The Expression Web Designer application walks the Web standards walk. One caution: Web Designer currently only supports ASP.NET.

The same attitude that leads MS to believe they can ignore standards (essentially, writing their own) is what leads them to believe they can ignore other "standard" practices, like using a variety of tools, platforms, and development schemes.

In other news, Microsoft has decided to start releasing to the world "air," which will be an alternative to whatever it is you are presently inhaling. MSAir will not contain any oxygen, so it may not be of much use to some users.

Huh?

[93 Escort Wagon]

"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.

Re:Huh?

[Aphrika]

They're not as contradictory as it first appears really.

Web standards pretty much determine the markup output server-side and how that markup is rendered in the browser. ASP.NET 2.0 is a server-side technology that outputs XHTML compliant code that will work in any browser - no ASP.NET stuff ever gets near the browser.

In that respect, ASP.NET is as web standards compliant as any other server-side technology - PHP, JSP, anything - it's virtually irrelevant to what gets output and arrives at the browser.

However, you're right in that Expression looks and feels half-baked. Visual Studio.NET is just fine for putting together 'professional' ASP.NET stuff, so why you'd want to release a product that overlaps is beyond me, especially when pages adhering to web standards can be put together in notepad if you know what you're doing (which from experience a lot of web designers don't).

Re:Huh?

[BRSQUIRRL]

Good grief, have any of the commenters here actually USED ASP.NET 2.0? Or are you just basing your statements on some half-true rant you read three years ago in a PHP forum somewhere? ASP.NET 2.0 actually does a pretty good job of rendering standards-compliant XHTML to the client browser. In fact, the only required piece of the ASP.NET toolchain that is made by Microsoft is IIS. I can use any page/code editor to build a site and any (current) browser to view them. Before someone objects...yes, it is possible to build horribly noncompliant pages in ASP.NET (just as it is in PHP), and yes, it is much easier to do some ASP.NET tasks in Visual Studio, but...come on people.

And when they say that "Web Designer currently only supports ASP.NET", they only mean that if you want to do some kind of server-side development using Expression, it is going to be ASP.NET. You are perfectly free to develop XHTML/CSS/JavaScript to your heart's content. But what's that? Microsoft didn't include PHP/JSP/Rails support? Oh, nevermind. It's a toy for "fanboys". Sheesh.

Re:Huh?

[nhavar]

DING DING DING... give the man a prize for... "a lot of web designers don't." There's a difference between web designers and web developers in a quite a few of the people I've met. Some call themselves web developers and yet rely very heavily on the tools to do all of the work for them. Not in one of those "work smarter not harder" ways, but in the "what's wrong with the font tag" way. They're really designers. Most of the time they might as well be using Photoshop or Illustrator to mockup the site and then hand it off to a web developer to figure out the code. Of course, I've also met my share of dipshits in that camp too. They're too eager to use buzzword-de-jour and end up relying on Sun/Oracle/IBM's tooling and create double the amount of work for themselves.

MS knows that there are plenty of people out there who are willing to fork over good money for a tool that is just adequate so that they can output content, applications, documents, etc., that is just adequate. That's where the real money is. It's not in producing the best product or service it's about appealing to the mass audience of neophites and apathetic designer/developers.

What I would like to know is...

[Eric Damron]

...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...

Kool-aid?

[fm6]

Microsoft finally drank the Kool-Aid.

Why is "drink the Kool-Aid" such a popular expression for "leap of faith"? Isn't anybody put off the orgin of the phrase?

Too little, too late

[v3xt0r]

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)

Re:Too little, too late

[Lego-Lad]

Dreamweaver doesn't create sloppy code any longer. Adobe.Macromedia has done a great job of improving Dreamweaver, including CSS support. One can create strict or transitional xhtml right in the code view - no more garbage is inserted. A lot of the JS snippets haven't changed, but if you do that, you probably have your own library already developed. DW is a tool for rapid application development. It's faster than hand coding, and produces excellent code when used correctly. This wasn't always the case, but to be fair, DW8 is excellent.

It's about what, no how

[fm6]

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!

Re:Standards Compliant Editor Useless Without IE F

[Khuffie]

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.

Uh, oh...

[__aaclcg7560]

Microsoft seems to be lost in the web design field. Can someone hand them a LAMP and a good text editor so they can find their way?

Long Time Dreamweaver User - Impressed

[Anamanaman]

As a long time dreamweaver user (Since 4.0), I tried Expression web designer last week and really like it. The interface is better laid out than Dreamweaver and it has a really great HTML View (where I spend most of my time). The css support is also top notch.

ASP.NET really has nothing to do with this editor. Its focused on HTML and CSS. If you are an ASP.NET developer, it will let you drop in server controls and thats about. You'd be crazy to use this instead of Visual Studio.NET for real coding. This is purely an HTML editor.

All developers (including PHP/JSP) can use this to build their HTML comps before making the site dynamic. Once it stabalizes it will definately give Dreamweaver a run for its money.

I want to believe

[alienmole]

The Jonestown incident is the whole point: drinking the Kool-Aid is an act of unquestioning blind allegiance, with no critical thought involved. The reason it's such a popular expression is that you see so many people behaving this way, towards all sorts of things not worthy of such behavior, like companies, politicians, cars, you name it. As Mulder might put it, they want to believe... in something, anything.

Re:neither works

[orasio]

I have been talking with good designer friends for ages about that issue.
What I have come to understand is that Dreamweaver is a great app for web development.
What I finally understood, and they confirmed, is that the wysiwyg part of Dreamweaver is not what makes it so great.
They love it for the integration it provides, and powerful management of project (searches, publishing, that kind of stuff).
They don't use the visual editing, because it doesn't produce profesional output, and editing right into the code view is much more reliable.

If that is your case too, plus, you are proficient with common console tools, like grep/diff, and using shell scripts to perform batch jobs like changing jpegs resolutions, you can replace Dreamweaver with Quanta Plus, or the lighter Bluefish. All the help you need for editing html and css. And remember to install ies4linux , so you can see the result on IE, too.

If that is not your case, keep DreamWeaver and try to be happy. But stay away from NVU, that's only useful for mockups or very quick and small stuff.

Re:Okay but what if

[JacksBrokenCode]

At some point the users gonna say "why are all these people pist at IE?"

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.

Professionals

[nurb432]

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.

So what if it's just for ASP.NET

[merlin_jim]

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.

Gah

[atokata]

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.)

HTML source of original article text:

[blueZ3]

xmlns:w="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:expression:expr ession">

<head>
<meta name=Title content="Microsoft Expression">
<meta name=Keywords content="">
<meta http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=windows">
<meta name=ProgId content=Expression.Document>
<meta name=Generator content="Microsoft Expression">
<meta name=Originator content="Microsoft Expression">

<!--[if gte mso 9]>
<xml>
  <o:DocumentProperties>
    <o:Template>Normal
    </o:Template>
  < o:LastAuthor>Bob Bobson</o:LastAuthor>
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    <o:TotalTime>0</o:TotalTime>
    <o:Created>2006-09-03T02:48:00Z</o:Created>
    <o:LastSaved>2006-09-03T02:48:00Z</o:LastSaved>
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  </o:DocumentProperties>
  <o:DocumentSettings>
    <o:AllowPNG/>
  </o:OfficeDocumentSettings>
</xml><![endif]-->
  <w:ExpressionDocument>
    <w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayH orizontalDrawingGridEvery>
    <w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayVer ticalDrawingGridEvery>
    <w:UseMarginsForDrawingGridOrigin/>
  </w:ExpressionDocument>
</xml><![endif]-->

< body bgcolor=white lang=EN-US style='tab-interval:.5in' >
<div class=Section1>
<p class=MsoNormal>
Expression is teh roxor
<p>

Dreamweaver slows companies down

[cartel]

I make web sites for a living, and I will not use Dreamweaver. Every single time - without an exception - anytime I have come across a web site developed using Dreamweaver (or any WYSIWYG editors for that matter) it is based on junk code.

When I make web sites, they are always 95% - 100% XHTML 1.0 and CSS compliant, so I now what I'm talking about. At work it slows us down tremendously when a web designer decides to deveop a site in Dreamweaver. It takes more time to fix things than to develop the whole site by hand. And I'll not even mention how long it takes to edit or add something new into the pages.

Until computers can literally think like humans can - and I truly believe they will, they will NEVER be able to produce web sites or computer programs at the same level of quality that a human can because it does not understand what the person is trying to do (e.g., establishing user-defined CSS classes).