VERDICT Microsoft finally recognizes that professional web authoring needs a standards-compliant tool – just so long as they are Microsoft-approved standards.

Both the Web and Microsoft are central to modern computing but FrontPage, Microsoft’s longstanding web authoring application, is generally viewed with contempt. Microsoft has finally bitten the bullet, killing off FrontPage and replacing it with a complete rewrite: Expression Web.

One of FrontPage’s major failings was its over-friendly interface which pretended that designing a successful web page was as simple as designing for print. The familiar Word-style formatting toolbar remains but otherwise Expression Web has gone to the other extreme and now looks like Visual Studio with a central design and coding window surrounded on all sides by taskpanes. There are no less than 18 of these with core options for managing files (this is also done in the central pane), dragging and dropping tags and controls and then setting their properties, applying styles and checking compatibility. For current FrontPage users it will inevitably seem intimidating, but Microsoft’s usability team has done a good job and the new interface is generally well-thought through and efficient.
A more serious stumbling block to the acceptance of FrontPage was its disdain for standards – if the end page looked OK in Internet Explorer that was all that Microsoft seemed to care about. Thankfully Microsoft has learned its lesson and is making all the right noises about standards support. In particular Expression Web targets the XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS 2.1 specifications by default and flags any incompatibilities in the Status Bar and Code View. You can also override these defaults to target other HTML, XHTML and CSS Schemas and, using the Compatibility Checker, you can check any number of pages against a particular schema or IE browser version (and any CSS formatting against IE6). Microsoft has undoubtedly made life easier for itself by ignoring HTML versions before 4.01 and all browsers apart from Internet Explorer – but this cut-down fresh start covers most current bases and will also make life easier for Expression Web’s users.

Expression Web focuses on supporting the XHTML and CSS standards for content and design handling

With such a modern approach to web design, CSS support is fundamental and Expression Web pulls out all the stops starting off with a sophisticated rendering engine designed to handle anything thrown at it in both standards and quirks modes. To begin putting CSS to work there are a range of CSS-based site templates on offer and your designs can then be customised with the Apply Styles, Manage Styles and CSS Properties taskpanes – the latter showing just which styles are feeding into the current formatting and letting you quickly view and edit their properties. The handling isn’t perfect – for example the style preview is on the Manage rather than Apply Styles panel – but it’s generally very efficient and often a pleasure to use, especially the ability to drag-and-drop styles between the current page and external style sheet and to change the order of the cascade.