Evaluating Microsoft's^® HTML editors>

Our painful experiences with Microsoft's^®
FrontPage^® & Expression Web^® programs

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Our painful experience with Microsoft programs:

	The program terminated itself frequently and rarely ran for more than a few hours at a time without crashing. Failure happened at one of two times: When opening another HTML file for editing, or When relocating of the cursor to another place in the text and tried to enter new text.
	I later concluded that many of these failures may have been caused by an incompatibility of Expression Web with Ipswitch's WS_FTP program. It seems that the former often crashes when both are running.
	The program has an import function that allows the user to download an existing website from the Internet for editing. Unfortunately, it downloaded only about 60% of the essays on our site. The rest have to be handled manually.
	When it downloaded our site it couldn't interpret most of the ©, ®, and similar symbols. They were replaced with a square box symbol: � Each box had to be manually found and corrected.  With almost 4,400 essays in our website at the time, this was not a trivial task.
	On a similar note, using the Symbols option on the Insert pull down menu allows one to insert all kinds of symbols into the text. But when uploaded to our server, the symbols are shown as a string of characters resembling Arabic more than English.
	Occasionally, when saving an essay, the program would seize up for 20 minutes or so, while it roamed through the entire site, making unknown changes to every file -- a very unsettling experience.

Webmasters deserve better software.

I downloaded a free 30 day trial of Expression Web 2 in the hope that some of these problems had been corrected. (We are very slow learners, ever hopeful.) There does not seem to be any significant improvement over the original version in terms of reliability and usefulness. It seems to have been a slight improvement in that it failed about twice a day.

I downloaded a free 30 day trial version of Expression Web 3. I could not get it to install. The file downloaded properly, but when I ran the setup program, it generated two programs (setup.exe and Xsetup.exe). the latter consumed a steady 25% of my CPU power, and ran overnight without actually creating anything.

This was the point that pushed us over the edge and prompted us to search for an alternative to Expressions Web.

Fortunately, Microsoft allows owners of various competitive programs to switch to Expression Web by paying only the $99 upgrade price. Their list of programs includes various Adobe and Quark programs. Taking a cue from Microsoft's list, I decided to investigate Adobe's Dreamweaver CS3 (a.k.a. Dw) as a replacement for Expression Web.

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