Microsoft FrontPage 2000 Upgrade CD

Managing sites is easier with FrontPage 2000 than it has been in earlier versions. The new Reports view offers more than a dozen instant reports--including broken links, recently added files, component errors and uncompleted tasks--and you can drill down through any of these reports to directly access the affected page or file. The only concern here is that if you change a broken link using this interface, you can't undo the change by simply pressing Ctrl+Z, since the undo command doesn't work in this specific environment. Also new to this version is an excellent Web-safe color selector. It offers a Web-safe palette, complete with hexadecimal values, and even lets you eye-drop colors from anywhere on your Desktop.

FrontPage 2000 marks the introduction of dynamic HTML (DHTML) functionality, as well as absolute or pixel-precise positioning. The latter function is extremely useful when you're building a graphics-intensive Web page in which the position of each graphic is key--pages with forms, animations and multimedia events, for example. You can even use this capability to layer the graphics. Where FrontPage disappointed me, though, is in its implementation of pixel-precise positioning. In this mode, there's no way to apply a grid or even zoom in or out on a page to help you position objects. Worse yet, although you can layer images, there's no way to reveal the layered objects. By contrast, Macromedia's Dreamweaver 2.0 allows you to freely position objects on a page, layer them and even apply complex behaviors to have the layers interact with each other.

FrontPage 2000 now offers a wide array of options for controlling your Web pages, and helps you make decisions about what level of browser compatibility you'll want your Web site to have. Choosing Netscape 4 and Internet Explorer 4 compatibility takes away almost all DHTML capabilities--with the exception of some page-load functions (such as hop-in, fly-in and the like) that are little more than animation flourishes.