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When Microsoft released Office 2007, Microsoft FrontPage was conspicuous by its absence. Its place has been taken by Microsoft Expression Web, a product which clearly aims to take some of Adobe Dreamweaver's huge share of the web design market. For once Microsoft finds itself playing the role of underdog and is sensibly adopting some of the tactics used by Adobe in gaining their dominant position in web design software. Expression Web is part of Expression Studio, which also includes Expression Design, a graphics tool which focuses on the creation of web interfaces. The full version of Expression Studio also includes Visual Studio 2005 Standard Edition. Although Expression Studio is by no means a direct competitor to Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft are clearly aiming to create a solution for professional web designers similar to the one available from Adobe. So, how good is Expression Web and will it enable Microsoft to make serious inroads into Adobe's share of the professional web development market? The short answer is "Yes". Expression Web is not simply a new version of FrontPage. It does not rely on FrontPage extensions to create functionality. Instead, it offers a professional, standards-compliant web development platform which makes it easy for both inexperienced and seasoned web designers to create accessible web pages using XHML, CSS, XML and JavaScript. It also out-performs Dreamweaver in accurately rendering CSS layouts in the design environment. On the downside, Expression Web only runs on Windows and its tight integration with Visual Studio suggests that a Mac version may be some time in arriving, assuming one ever does arrive. A significant number of web designers prefer to use Macs and, for this reason, will never see Expression Web as a serious rival to Dreamweaver. To win over such Mac diehards, Microsoft will have to make Expression Web not just as good as Dreamweaver but significantly better. Another possible problem area in Expression Web is that, on the server-side, it only supports Microsoft's own ASP.Net while Dreameaver offers support for ASP, ASP.Net, Coldfusion, PHP and JSP. However, it is not just Expression Web that has limitations in this department. Dreamweaver's support for ASP.Net and PHP is unimpressive and it has been years since the last upgrade to Dreamweaver's server-side functionality. Perhaps the biggest challenge facing Expression Web is the sheer size of Dreamweaver's established market. With over a million installations, Dreamweaver is recognised as the industry-standard in visual web development software. Also, as well as the features of program itself, there are hundreds of Dreamweaver-compatible software add-ons, called "Dreamweaver extensions", created by third parties and adopted by the Dreamweaver community. Microsoft recognises this and have given Expression Web similar extensibility. However, they have a lot of catching up to do. To summarise, Expression Web is a quality product. Like Dreamweaver, it focuses web designers on creating standards-compliant web pages with the minimum of effort. Adobe will have no option but to take this new contender seriously and come up with some new and innovative features in their next release of Dreamweaver. So, good news all round for users of web development software!
Article Source: http://www.go-see.info
The The writer of this article is a trainer and developer with Macresource Computer Solutions, a UK IT training company offering Adobe Dreamweaver Classes at their central London training centre.
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