MX vs. MS... go!

Cross posted from Maxwell's Alley

Doing this update today in MS FrontPage. I have no idea why. I had opened it up to see what it's XML and XSL processing capabilities were like. I've just had it open and decided I'd try an update in it just to see what happened. Turns out I'm not all that pleased with it so far. I have a couple of customizations in Dreamweaver that I'm missing.

Most notably at this point, I'm seeing two features I took for granted in Dreamweaver that are missing in Frontpage. Dreamweaver will complete tags for you, as will FrontPage. When you begin typing a tag or attribute in either program, you get presented with a dropdown list of potential tags. The <enter> key will complete the tag or attribute for you. However, when you complete an attribute that way in Dreamweaver, it adds the equals sign and first set of quote marks for you. For example, if the tag was a paragraph and you wanted to align to center, typing '<p ali' and hitting enter in Dreamweaver would get you '<p align="'. In FrontPage, the same actions only get you '<p align'. You still have to add the equals sign and quotes yourself. When you're used to fewer keystrokes to mark things up, that can be very annoying.

Also, when I write plain text, or a letter, or other type of document, I use two spaces at the end of a sentence, after a period. Just the way I was raised, I guess. A minor thing, but there's one of the differences between classical writing structure and writing for the web. On the web, there's only a single space between the period at the end of a sentence, and the next sentence. The reasoning for this is that HTML ignores additional white space in the markup. So if you had 10 spaces in the markup, it would still only display as one space on the final displayed page.

Why is this relevant to our conversation? When I write in design mode in Dreamweaver, it ignores additional presses of the space bar, since those would be ignored in the HTML markup. So I can write the same way I would write in email and other documentation, and Dreamweaver adjusts for my multiple spaces accordingly. In FrontPage, though, every additional touch of the space bar generates a space character in the markup (&nbsp;). I've been deleting a lot of those over the past couple of minutes.

That and I have some PHP code snippets stored in Dreamweaver that I use a lot. I'm having to type them by hand at the moment. Not a big deal, but still kind of a pain after reducing 32 lines of code to a double-click. FrontPage doesn't support PHP anyway. Yes, I am aware of the PHP-Rocket plug-in for FrontPage. 1. It sucks. 2. It requires you to use ASP-style tags, (<% rather than <?), which will break the page for other editors and systems, and breaks the system (PHP/IIS) for other PHP pages which weren't coded in FrontPage, and don't use ASP-style tags. 3. PHP is natively supported in most other editors, so it can't be that fscking hard to add to FrontPage, can it? (Or dotNET for that matter.) MS Just doesn't care to. That's a little too Frankenstein for my tastes. The heck with that.

Should have posted that on Geek Sandwich. Maybe I will... Feels like time for a cross-post.

Anyway: Boss' boss coming in for a visit today. I have some questions. I'll try not to make them sound like I'm venting. :-)

Got to get back to work. In the middle of an XML tutorial. (Again.)

- epilogue -

OK. Copied in the text from FrontPage, which didn't work due to the tags in the text. I'm OK with that. Then copied in the HTML directly, and discovered that blogger interprets ending paragraph tags as another line feed. Weird. THEN, removed the closing paragraph tags in the blogger editor to discover that blogger re-interpreted the line wraps as soft-returns. Weirder still. Finally copied the whole thing into Notepad, removed the soft-returns, fixed the paragraph tags, and re-pasted into the blogger editor. The result is what you see. I'm not fixing this again, today.