Expressing My Feelings About Expression Web Designer

January 3, 2007 on 4:31 pm | In Web Design, Web Programming |

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.

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