Microsoft's Frontpage 2003 is the latest version of its web-editing tool. A first glance clearly shows the influence of Macromedia's Dreamweaver, with the split view that shows code alongside your design, and code completion for tags, along with colour coding. There's the same sort of quick previewing in a range of web browsers, which allows you to specify the window size you want. You can even open Dreamweaver templates and use them directly.

When it comes to design, there's accurate layout and the ability to use a background image to trace over, which is useful if you want to create a website from printed material, or a design mocked up as a single graphic. There's an accessibility checker, too, to help make sure your site can be viewed by everyone.

There's a useful authoring preferences panel where you can disable specific features, to make sure you don't inadvertently create a site that only works with some browsers or servers. This was something of a nuisance in earlier versions of Frontpage, as it wasn't altogether clear that elements added to the site wouldn't work on an ordinary web server.

There are some other good touches too. Drop a picture on the page and you can drag to resize it and the proportions are maintained. You can then choose whether or not the picture is simply scaled by tags, or resampled to fit the new size; choose the former and the original is untouched. An auto-thumbnail option makes short work of that task too.

There's good support, of a type, for XML data sources. You can fairly quickly create a site that loads information from elsewhere on the web and, for example, displays a news story in a pane depending on which headline's been clicked in another. XML files can be opened and validated - although only in the sense that tags match properly - or reformatted. But, these features rely on the site being hosted on Windows Server 2003. Unlike Microsoft, we don't feel that such hosting is really widespread. Nor does Netcraft (www.netcraft.com), whose June survey had Apache on 67 per cent and Windows (all versions) on 21 per cent.

That makes it even more annoying that all the data-driven features are reliant on a Sharepoint server, although, if you have such a system, the integration is undoubtedly good, but what of those who want to use MySQL and PHP? Tough. The help on PHP tells you to use ASP-style tags, edit the server's PHP.ini file, make various other manual changes to Frontpage settings and then suggests you really should be looking at ASP.Net. Forget MySQL support. Indeed, you should probably forget Frontpage 2003 if you want to use such technologies.

The reliance on Sharepoint also seems to have blinded Microsoft to the foibles of sites that you upload by FTP and, unlike Dreamweaver, there's no support for SFTP either. The site settings don't appear when you create a new site, and they are a bit strange for FTP uploads. Even a server path beginning with a/is treated as a relative one, and relative paths are displayed in some dialogues as if they're absolute. To enter a path such as /home/sites you need to specify %2fhome/sites/ which is rather odd. There's no clear indication of what's happening and FTP seems generally sluggish too.

Other niggles include the labelling of editable areas in templates. With areas close together, the labels can overlap another zone and obscure what you're typing. After updating our Dreamweaver template, only the page created in Frontpage was changed; all the others were detected, but not updated and with no explanation.

Frontpage has undoubtedly made great strides in some areas. The built-in accessibility checker is a boon. The integration with Sharepoint lets you set up new sites or create weblogs easily. But if even half the Windows servers on the net have upgraded to the latest version, that's only 10 per cent. So there's a good chance your site's not hosted on Sharepoint, and you'll be stuck with a clunky FTP system and poor support for common languages such as PHP or tools such as MySQL. You also miss out on the built-in reference tools Macromedia provides. Frontpage may be half the price, but Dreamweaver is twice as good.

Contact: Microsoft 0870 601 0100
www.microsoft.com/uk

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