Getting better all the time

Did Internet Explorer 3 convince you Microsoft is serious about the Internet? If not, you might want to try Microsoft FrontPage, the company's no-code Web page authoring tool. FrontPage is Bill Gates' way of saying he reckons no-code Web publishing will attract millions of users. Microsoft now bills FrontPage as a member of the Office family. And in its latest version - FrontPage 97 - it's shaping up as a very, very serious web tool.

Real software giants don't often make their own Web software from scratch. Instead, they shop smart. Microsoft last year paid well over $A100 million for a little company called Vermeer Technologies, specifically to get its hands on FrontPage. Now FrontPage is building Mr Gates' reputation for spotting promising software.

Packaged by Microsoft, FrontPage has already run to the front of the pack that includes Corel's Web.Designer, Macromedia's Backstage Designer, Claris's Home Page and the freeware AOLPress. It uses a Windows-standard button bar to launch all the processes that create a well-turned-out Web page - links, tables, lists, image maps, text alignment and as much font manipulation as Web page design allows. many of the more complex processes use step-by-step "wizards". And when you want to create an entire site, it will lay it out in a neat diagram, all links and pages clearly labelled. Even some of the professionals intimately familiar with the HTML code that underlies all Web pages now use FrontPage to lay out slabs of their sites.

A better FrontPage

FrontPage 97 costs no more than the original version 1.1 - $149 - but offers much more value. The new program fixes the original FrontPage's most annoying deficiency: you can now edit your pages' HTML code directly if you need to do so. New buttons let you add Java applets, scripts and ActiveX controls, and you can preview your pages in the browser of your choice, a handy shortcut for a vital Web page design procedure.

Microsoft invades imaging

And most impressive of all, FP97 includes a brand new program called Image Composer - Microsoft's first serious step into the crowded field of image manipulation, where the industry standard, Adobe Photoshop, fends off pretenders like Corel's PhotoPaint and JASC's excellent shareware Paint Shop Pro. And Image Composer, while not perfect, contains Web image creation features unmatched by some more expensive offerings. Image Composer (which uses technology licensed from another small software group, Altamira) will apply a range of effects and filters to your pictures, and excels at integrating text with images. The CD includes 600 stock photos and a number of fonts. Most impressively of all, it will create images using the ideal 216-color palette for graphic display in both Windows and Apple machines. Users of packages like the much more expensive CorelDraw!6 have no such facility. Image Composer is slow and can be unwieldy; I found myself jumping back to Paint Shop and Corel PhotoPaint at times. But Image Composer has a huge future.

Not perfect yet

All the same, FP97 retains at least two flaws, one of them deep-seated.

The smaller flaw is the weakness of the Web Publishing Wizard included in the package. It's not really a wizard at all. Indeed, it's barely a sorcerer's apprentice: I couldn't make it perform any magic at all. After struggling with it for three hours one night, I finally uploaded all my pages to my server in ten minutes using the freeware FTP Explorer. Other users have reported the same frustration.

The worse flaw lies in FrontPage's use of special programs called Web- Bots to add features like discussion groups and forms to your pages. Though these gadgets have impressed some reviewers, they seem ahead of their time at best. At worst they're misguided. Many won't work unless your server installs special "extensions". And Australian users will struggle to find service providers who have installed the extensions and will let you use them.

To add insult to injury, FrontPage doesn't tell you whether your pages are using Microsoft's proprietary techniques, which require the server extensions, or whether you're simply using code that any server can deal with. In practice, most people putting their Web pages on someone else's server will need to think hard and then check carefully before using FrontPage's more sophisticated features. That stops FrontPage taking a decisive lead over rivals.

Hard to ignore - but flawed

FrontPage 97 ranks as a very attractive program - not just for its no-code editing but for Image Composer. Microsoft is showing off FrontPage 97 at its own site.

But after lengthy investigation, Lighthouse is convinced the FrontPage server extensions present Australian users with severe problems. The next page contains a more detailed discussion of these problems.

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