With GoLive all-but gone, it might seem that Dreamweaver now holds a monopoly over professional page-based web authoring.

However there’s still one company with the resources, vision and resolve necessary to mount a serious challenge to Adobe, and Microsoft is absolutely determined to do just that.

The bottom line is that professional web publishing is so important that it simply can’t afford to fail.
However to succeed Microsoft faces an uphill struggle, not just because of Dreamweaver’s dominance but because it has failed before – and badly. As such Microsoft’s first aim with its brand-new Expression Web application is to lay the ghost of its former web authoring application, FrontPage. FrontPage was one of the early web design pioneers and Microsoft chose it because it promised to make designing for the Web as simple and visual a process as designing for print. Unfortunately it isn’t – a web page is built on code and code that needs to be reliably interpreted and displayed across multiple cross-platform browsers. To keep life simple Microsoft tried to protect its users from this code, ignored common standards and targeted its own Internet Explorer browser. The result was that FrontPage sites worked fine when viewed locally on a user’s own system but the code was ugly, inefficient and often didn’t work at all when viewed with other browsers. From a professional designer’s point of view it was a disaster.
Eventually Microsoft saw the light and tried to make FrontPage more professional, but the damage had been done and few self-respecting designers would even look at it. Finally Microsoft has bitten the bullet and recognized that reworking FrontPage isn’t an option; it has to start from scratch. That’s where the new Expression Web comes in and, with it, Microsoft is determined to show that it has learned its lesson. As such, while Expression Web retains a visual wysiwyg editing environment, there’s a completely new focus on code and in particular on efficiently creating clean, standards-compliant code.
For a first release to try to compete with an established veteran such as Dreamweaver is a tall order, but Expression Web’s fresh start gives it two clear advantages. Firstly Microsoft’s developers have been able to take the best from both FrontPage and Dreamweaver to produce a streamlined, focused and productive interface which gets you up and running as quickly as possible and then helps keep you on top of your site (see Site Handling walkthrough). Secondly, when it comes to code, Expression Web can simply ignore all the many highways and byways that have emerged over the years as web design has organically evolved and instead concentrate all its efforts on the current state-of-the-art of modern web design.
When it comes to the web page’s underlying HTML code this means that Expression Web can simply ignore all the early browser-specific workarounds and the once standard tags that are now officially deprecated. In fact, by default, Expression Web creates its pages based on the XHTML 1.0 Transitional specification, the XML-based rewrite of HTML. The great strength of XHTML is the new rigour that it brings to bear which means that, for example, all those inefficient and undesirable table and font tags that FrontPage relied on so heavily to handle layout and formatting are now things of the past.
Instead Expression Web makes full use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), the presentational mark-up language designed to work hand-in-hand with XHTML’s content-based mark-up. CSS is supremely efficient offering centralized design control of both layout and formatting – apply a pre-defined CSS style to your page, for example, and your text is instantly and consistently formatted. Even better, make a single change to a style stored in an external style sheet and you can completely change the appearance of a whole site.
However handling CSS is by no means simple as, for example, different and potentially conflicting rules stored in different places – in external style sheets, in the document’s head and inline - all feed in to the final appearance. The difficulty of implementation that follows from this “cascade” of styles as well as patchy browser support explains Dreamweaver’s comparatively slow take-up of CSS. However browser support has now improved to the point where CSS formatting and positioning are now seen as absolutely fundamental to modern page-based web design and, Expression Web can claim to offer the most efficient CSS handling available (see Page Design walkthrough).
Tackling Dreamweaver head-on when it comes to streamlined efficiency and core page design capabilities is no mean feat and the planned Ajax-enabled update should boost Expression Web’s credentials when it comes to creating dynamic and interactive pages. Most significantly, the soon-to-be-released Expression Studio will put Expression Web at the heart of a comprehensive CS3-style suite focused on professional web and application design. While the latest Dreamweaver CS3 remains the current choice for professional web page design, this first release of Expression Web creates a strong platform on which Microsoft can, and will, build.
GoLive and FrontPage might have bitten the dust but, with Expression Web, Dreamweaver now faces its most serious competition yet.