Expressing My Feelings About Expression Web Designer

January 3, 2007 on 4:31 pm | In Web Design, Web Programming | No Comments

By R Kamalathasan, Web Designer, The Magnum Group

Recently I had a chance to try Microsoft’s Expression Web Designer trial version, and here are the impressions it made on me.

I was interested in taking it for a whirl to evaluate the buzz in web development circles that Expression Web Designer is a whole new product and not an upgraded version of FrontPage 2003.

My reactions to this preliminary exercise were as follows:

• The design interface looks neat and displays the content correctly when checked with a previously built web site.
• The support for CSS styles was very impressive, showing a very big improvement over FrontPage
• Its error identification capability in code view is also excellent. Problem code is identified by a wavy underline, and when you mouseover the spot, you see a description of the problem in a tooltip. With this kind of help, you can easily construct a standards-compliant web site (which you could not do with FrontPage)
• The Page Editor option contains plenty of improvements over FrontPage. In the authoring tab there are options to choose a default document type, a document type declaration and a CSS schema. There is also a new tab for CSS which applies styles automatically according to the tab’s settings
• The Visual Aids option will definitely be useful for beginners to identify the elements of a page without difficulty.

Surprise: Nothing’s Perfect!

There are of course some drawbacks to employing Expression Web Designer (especially for advanced users):

• The lack of support for PHP and JSP.
• It only works with Windows.

Conclusion:

Expression Web Designer is an excellent tool for the professional web designer that is purely in compliance with Web 2.0 and CSS 2.1 standards. It will go a long way in making the average site conform to current-day coding standards.

Technorati Tags: FrontPage, HTML+editor, XHTML+editor, web+design, web+designer

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Ajax: Just Like A Backdoor Thief

January 2, 2007 on 6:19 pm | In Web Design, Web Programming | No Comments

So why the devil, after saying so many good things earlier about Ajax, such as likening it to vitamin pills and fast food (hmmmm.. that might not be so good…) am I painting it a sinister shade?

Well actually I don’t intend to imply criminality, it’s more like robbing Peter to pay Paul… and what’s being transferred is page views.

Ajax, as most techies know, stands for Asynchronous JavaScript And XML. It’s a programming strategy that enables a web page to be updated with new information without the page reloading each time. Google Maps and Gmail are examples.

With a non-Ajax page, if you caused a page to change, a page reload would have to occur. But not with an Ajax page. The page is updated without a reload, which implies you can experience multiple page views without the page reloading.

So what’s the big deal?  I’ll tell you what. Web analytics programs, which measure page views (among other things), depend on page reloads to increment their page view counter. With Ajax, the page views occur without the page reloads. The accuracy of your web analytics program’s page view figures is therefore significantly diminished and could mislead you.

It’s like the web analytics program is guarding the front door of your house while all the time, stuff’s being taken out the back!

The solution: Web analytics programs have to start watching the ‘back door’ too!

Matt Cutts, the famous/infamous Google engineer, screamed about this in his blog recently, you might want to look at Matt’s post to delve deeper…

I take this opportunity to wish your web analytics program a happy and prosperous 2007 —

… and a Happy New Year to you too  :-)

Technorati Tags: Matt+Cutts, Ajax, web+analytics, page+views

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