Food for thought.....
Question: I've read about the garbage FrontPage puts in its HTML code. I'm curious what garbage this is, because I've coded 300+ pages in FrontPage 2000 and they seem clean as a whistle.
Answer: Hand-coding is the only way to ensure clean code, but we all don't have time for that, so we turn to WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors like FrontPage. There are several problems with using FrontPage. Whenever creating a Web page in FrontPage, the resulting page in other browsers looks nothing like what you see in FrontPage or in Microsoft Explorer, of course. In some cases, the page doesn't show up at all in Netscape, Opera, or other browsers. FrontPage places extra, unnecessary code in the document. The following is a simplified example.
If we use bold and font tags (using the Georgia font) in the phrase "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog," the clean HTML code looks like this:
<p><b><font face="Georgia">The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.</font></b></p>
If I change my mind and remove the bold and change the font to Arial in FrontPage, it can become:
<p><font face="Arial">The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.</font> <font face="Georgia"></font></p>
The Georgia font tag is still there, even though there is no code
between the <font> and </font>. This is typical FrontPage behavior
after repeatedly modifying a page. Each new version of FrontPage
improves, but it still lags behind the other WYSIWYG editors.
Author Dori Smith did a comparison of editors and how much code
they produce. "The goal was to produce a simple Web page
containing just a single linked image that rolled over to another
image."
The summary of the results:
- Macromedia Dreamweaver MX: 49 lines, 1,733 characters
- Adobe GoLive 6: 55 lines, 1,453 characters
- Microsoft FrontPage 2002: 730 lines, 16,380 characters
- Hand-coding: 29 lines, 858 characters
Contributed by Mike Yoder