What's Different in Expression Web Beta 1

Typically, when Microsoft develops a product, it releases a collection of Community Technology Previews (CTPs) and betas to allow customers to see what kinds of features have been added to the product over the course of the development cycle. Expression Web, previously called Expression Web Designer, is no exception to this, and we recently released the first beta for our product. Unlike other releases though, you will see that one of the big differences between this beta and our previous CTP is that we have been busy removing, rather than adding features. We know that this is not the usual path for a product team, and it is often the case that when you see features pulled from a release, it is because the product team is running behind schedule. In this case, though, we are removing these features because you, our customers, have provided us feedback that some of our features were not appropriate for a high-end, standards compliant web design tool. I know that this is not something you typically expect from Microsoft, so I wanted to take the opportunity to explain.

So, what is being removed? Basically, we are removing features that rely on the presence of Front Page Server Extensions (FPSE) for rendering your website correctly.

FPSE actually plays two distinct roles for Microsoft’s HTML editors. The first is the role you may already be familiar with: FPSE communicates with your web server to download and upload files. This part of FPSE also makes link fix-up work. This is not the feature we are removing. Expression Web will continue to support the ability to use FPSE as a way to connect to your web server and perform link fix-up.

What we are removing from Expression Web is the second FPSE role: those features known as “bots” that use FPSE as a server-side scripting system. These bots, which we carried over into Expression Web from FrontPage, include things like Themes, Shared Borders, the Photo Gallery and the Hit Counter. In this role, FPSE takes web pages that have special markup in them - HTML comments that have a well-defined format - and uses the markup to generate a more complex set of HTML.

Note: Even though there are bots that don’t require FPSE on your server (because FrontPage and Expression Web contained an embedded version of FPSE), bots as a whole have significant issues and, for reasons that will be explained below, we are deprecating them.

Why did we do this, and what does mean for existing FrontPage customers that use bots? Let me explain...

A challenge for Expression Web

When the Expression Web team at Microsoft first started planning, we had a dilemma.  On one hand, we wanted Expression Web to be a modern web design tool taking advantage of the latest standards and targeting professional web designers. On the other hand, we knew that with FrontPage going away, Expression Web would be the primary web design tool from Microsoft. While the FrontPage market consisted mainly of consumers, hobbyists and small businesses rather than professional designers, we have a responsibility to these customers and we didn’t want to leave them high and dry.

This left us with a number of questions: How similar should we make the user interfaces?  How much of FrontPage's feature set should we support?  Some of these questions were easy to answer, and we quickly settled on an approach that would achieve the following goals:

• We would use naming and terminology that was consistent with FrontPage when it did not interfere with our goal of creating a home for professional web designers on the Microsoft platform.
• We would use menus and other UI artifacts that were consistent with FrontPage when it did not interfere with our goal of creating a home for professional web designers on the Microsoft platform.
• While keeping the above in mind, we would make big investments in creating a standards-focused editor that was optimized for professional designers.

This was a good start, but even after setting these ground rules, we were left with the following question: How much of the old FrontPage feature set, particularly bots like Navigation, Shared Borders and Themes, should Expression Web support?  On one hand supporting these features would help users with existing FrontPage sites move over to Expression Web. On the other hand, these features were not necessarily attractive to professional designers.  Some of the problems with these features include:

• Some of these features, like the Photo Gallery only work correctly with Internet Explorer.
• Some of these features, like the Photo Gallery, do not generate the kind of high-quality content that designers expect.
• Some of these features, like the Hit Counter, do not provide designers with the kind of stylistic control they require.
• Many of these features were tied to FrontPage Server Extensions, so that your content would not render if you tried to use your website on a server that did not have these extensions.

Layering: An initial solution

Our initial solution to this issue – the one you saw in our CTP – can be thought of as the 'layering approach'.  In this solution we would incorporate nearly all of the existing FrontPage features into Expression Web for maximum compatibility. On top of this, we would add new features which were more focused on the professional designer, things like rich support for Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) and great design-time visualizations.  This approach was nice because it would allow us to move our focus toward professional designers while still leaving room for the existing FrontPage customer base. However, this solution was not the best option based on feedback from designers who worked with our CTP, and because these features could leave you with a website that only rendered correctly on a web server that had FPSE installed.

As a part of creating Expression Web, we wanted to show professional designers more respect. We believe professional designers are folks who feel that the design experience – how something looks and how you interact with it matters. Our ultimate goal is to build the kind of interface designers love to use, an interface that inspires creativity. FrontPage might have worked best with FPSE, but we wanted to be sure Expression Web provided an excellent experience whether you use FPSE or not. Ultimately this issue is not about technology or about functionality, it’s about trust. One of the reasons I joined the Expression team was to help Microsoft build trust with the designer community, and part of that is letting you make the decisions on how to build your sites or where to deploy them. This is why we are deprecating bots and investing heavily (and will continue to invest) in our support for using FTP and other non-proprietary protocols for communicating with web servers.

Upgrading: Our Expression Web path

We went back to the drawing board and came up with the 'upgrade' approach, which you will see in our next CTP release.  It consists of three main tenets:

• In sites that don’t use bots, hide any Expression Web features that refer to them. In other words, FPSE bot features in Expression Web disappear if the web page you are working on doesn’t already use them.
• Help the existing FrontPage community make the transition toward more modern standards-based web design techniques.
• Provide a minimum level of support possible for pages that already have bots: you won’t find a way to add things like Shared Borders or FrontPage Themes to a website, but web pages or websites that already have these features will continue to render correctly.

This approach has two benefits: If you are an existing FrontPage user who is interested in moving into the world of modern, standards-based web design, then you should find Expression Web to be a familiar environment in which you can be productive very quickly. On the other hand, if you are a new customer to Microsoft (with respect to web design tools) then you should find that Expression Web is a design-oriented, professionally focused web editor that is uncompromising in its support for creating standards-based web sites.

We are aware, though, that this will cause pain for those existing FrontPage users that do not fall into these groups. Ultimately, we believe that your best solution may well be moving into a more managed web environment like SharePoint, where the vagaries of html and standards compliance will not impact you. If you are one of the people in this situation, I hope that you understand why we made this decision. If not, well, my email address is Erik.Saltwell@microsoft.com

Erik Saltwell - Development Manager, Expression Web

Comments

• Anonymous
  September 08, 2006
  While I fully appreciate and applaud deprecating anything that needs FP extensions or a "non standard" server, there are some bots in FP that did not use them, such as include pages and date stamps.
  
  What was the purpose of deprecating those also?

• Anonymous
  September 08, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  September 09, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  September 09, 2006
  Interesting that in the three posts so far, we are all saying the same thing about Includes and this is the only feedback so far. This seems to be an indicator or sorts? I agree on the background it's hard to read.
  
  BTW I realise those with savvy on the team will not have been voting to keep page transitions ...whose bright idea was it keep those? They are on the level of hit counters and hover buttons. Substitution has also gone, and while I can live without it, it was useful.  Why not put together a javascript for behaviours for the time stamp? A lot of these bits and peices could be used for javascript, it would be nice to be able to include our own behaviours in there instead of having to use snippets. Also why keep the layout tools which generate all that extra code? While I'm about it I'd like to know why the thumbnail feature has to generate
  
  <!-- MSComment="autothumbnail" xthumbnail-orig-image="images/snip.bmp" -->
  
  Just putting it behind comment tags to make it validate (I noticed that changed from ctp to beta1 ) does not make it right. Did version previous to 03 do this? I've not got the older versions put back (after the first ctp wiped em) to check. The code is not needed once the thumbnail is done. Now other third party apps don't need to generate the extra code why does ew? However at least it does validate thanks to the comment tags but its clunky.... clunky is NOT good, EW should be elegant.
  
  Tina

• Anonymous
  September 09, 2006
  "In many cases, a site can be reworked to use DWTs instead of Includes, but not in all cases. Designers use Includes to repeat content (not navigation) throughout their site...."
  
  Well, even then - not really.
  
  In EW you are limited to ONE DWT - they won't stack. So if you want includes only on some pages, you are back to using code snippets, which is far from an ideal solution.
  
  And I have to agree also with page transitions - does anyone past the free website personal page stage actually USE those?
  
  The two things that were most useful to me - the Navigation and includes were dropped in favor of THAT ... EWWWW yuck!

• Anonymous
  September 09, 2006
  I can't agree with navigation bots, you have no real control over what appears and are limited to the scenerios it give. They don't validate and they use extra code. The main problem is the lack of control, by using includes, you can make accessbile navigation with little maintenance, which is my main criteria for using them.
  
  Without a dwt in use they are (includes) essential also for repetative content such as headers and footers if one wants to cut down on chores.
  Tina
  
  

• Anonymous
  September 10, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  September 11, 2006
  Everyone,  thanks for all the great feedback and comments!  I hope to post another blog entry today in response.

• Anonymous
  September 11, 2006
  We are pleased to announce that the Beta 1 release of Expression Web (formerly Expression Web Designer)...

• Anonymous
  September 13, 2006
  A couple of questions:
  1.  Using ftp to publish:  What happens with shared content such as borders and includes.
  They will not update properly when publishing via ftp. Result, broken web.
  
  2.  Metadata files.  Since the metadata ( vti files ) is being removed from the server and
  stored in the %UserProfile% section
  of the drive, what happens for example, when I log on to a site to make changes with a
  laptop when traveling, and the laptop has never
  had the web published to it or edited by it.  With no metadata on the server, changes to
  DWT's / Master pages will not propagate to all
  pages that use them.
  

• Anonymous
  September 14, 2006
  What to do to get Expression Web Beta 1 running on Windows Vista RC1?

• Anonymous
  September 22, 2006
  Though I am a bit late in the comment about includes, let me again note the obvious:
  
  1) they are not about server side processing
  
  2) they do not violate any web standards of any kind anywhere
  
  3) they are about content management
  
  4) they have serious uses totally unrelated to "navigation"
  
  5) they have serious uses that cannot be duplicated by DWTs or any other tool
  
  6) they do not require server hosted FrontPage Server Extensions
  
  7) that they are "bots" is irrelevant to the discussion (again, because bots implemented within an authoring system, using standard comments, do not violate any web standards of any kind anywhere
  
  8) the competition has similar functions and if EW doesn't, it makes EW less competitive, less "professional" and less capable; this will encourage current FP users to investigate the competition and will delay other users from adopting EW
  
  9) they work
  
  Please help all of us make this issue go away. Find a way to put them back.
  
  James S. Huggins
  aka Mr. Include

• Anonymous
  September 22, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  September 22, 2006
  Pointing to this blog.
  
  After poking around I realize that my comment about includes (above) was probably unnecessary. I did not see the notes about this because the page at http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/web_designer/wd_free_trial.aspx points to http://blogs.msdn.com/xweb/archive/2006/09/09/747051.aspx instead of pointing to http://blogs.msdn.com/xweb/default.aspx.
  
  My suggestion is to change http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/web_designer/wd_free_trial.aspx to point to http://blogs.msdn.com/xweb/default.aspx
  
  James S. Huggins

• Anonymous
  September 27, 2006
  Erik, Anna, et. al,
  
  Would you please elaborate on the changes in XML and XSLT between the CTP and Beta 1? There appear to be substantial changes and I've been seeing quite a few questions on using XML in Expression Web. Especially in regards to web.sitemap and the navigation controls in ASP.NET.
  
  How to migrate from FrontPage navigation bots to a more standards oriented replacement is one of those issues that are very important for those who are updating.
  
  Cheryl D Wise

• Anonymous
  September 30, 2006
  I have just uninstalled the previous web express and now i am receiving this error when trying to install the new web express..
  
  erik
  
  http://www.Afcc1.Com/CanDelete/webDesignerERROR.png

• Anonymous
  October 04, 2006
  First off, I want to say that I really enjoy the beta release. However, I do have a few gripes... I represent a fairly large niche of young designer/developers who are fluent in both back-end code (e.g., PHP, ASP, Ruby, Perl, etc) and front-end code (e.g., XHTML, CSS). I’ve almost entirely stopped using DreamWeaver as my main IDE, and here are my main complaints: 1.) Why is there a lack of syntax highlighting (color coding) for server side scripting languages? If you want to appeal to the largest audience, you will finally NEED to implement (at least) PHP support. It is well known, in fact, that PHP is the most popular development language. But, really, it can’t be that hard to support other languages. Look at the open source editor Notepad++. 2.) I could careless about anything dealing with FrontPage bots. Please continue to rip out anything non-standard. Ick. I use strict XHTML/CSS, and sit in the code view while editing. I am a code grunt, and wouldn't have it any other way. Thus, I NEVER want my code rewrote/reformatted for any reason. FrontPage seemed to have issues with this. So, why don’t I just use a glorified text editor? Because, I like the robustness of a full-featured IDE (e.g., intelisense, automatic tag closing, file synchronization with the server, etc). It cannot be too hard to implement syntax highlighting (code coloring) for PHP and other languages, can it? 3.) Why don't the rest of you install IIS on your XP boxes and use PHP for includes? It's incredibly easy! :-)

• Anonymous
  October 05, 2006
  Will there be support for SFTP in future releases?

• Anonymous
  October 13, 2006
  Quote: We are aware, though, that this will cause pain for those existing FrontPage users that do not fall into these groups. Ultimately, we believe that your best solution may well be moving into a more managed web environment like SharePoint, where the vagaries of html and standards compliance will not impact you. If you are one of the people in this situation, I hope that you understand why we made this decision.   Unquote This approach makes no sense to me.  This is the product maker telling the customer what they need?  Would "serious/professional" web designers be "offended" if web bots such as page counters where included?  Why not include legacy capabilities and allow the customer if/when/how fast they want/need to transistion to "standard" web designing.  Some of FrontPage's best features where due to the "handholding" that it provided.  You may be turning off many of the hobby website designers by this approach.

• Anonymous
  October 16, 2006
  What is beeing done to make Expressions accessible with: www.screenreader.net, we want our web expressions for free!

• Anonymous
  October 18, 2006
  Urk.  I just read this thread and learned about the disappearance of the design-time Include Pages feature that relies on FrontPage Extensions (and embedded bot-markup) to do it.  I am also a heavy user of that feature.  In fact, I have a whole set of document-engineering practices and patterns that rely on that feature and all of my sites rely on it:

• All of the standard boilerplate (logos, etc.) are brought in from include pages that I can manage in one place.  I even use Include Pages to accomplish a form of versioning.  
• You can see an example of that at http://nuovodoc.com/products/ODMlicensing.htm and follow the hard-hat in the lower-left corner to see what is going on. Well, I guess I now understand a side conversation that I was in at the iWoz book-signing.  Dang. So I get to run FrontPage on my little IIS development server until one of them just won't run any more.  Fancy that.

• Anonymous
  October 18, 2006
  I agree with the last post. I’ve used includes on 100’s of sites. They make life easy! Since EW is a visual design tool and, why would you want to remove such a useful feature?  I see no reason to remove functionality, particularly when Includes are standards compliant.  As far as I’m concerned you can ace everything else, but KEEP the Includes. BTW the CSS features are awesome! I’ve love the fact that I can now use just one program for design work.

• Anonymous
  October 19, 2006
  This has already been brought up, right from the beginning. I suggest you also join the EW Newsgroup to see the discussion. Visit the connect feedback and add your vote. https://connect.microsoft.com/feedback/default.aspx -it's not available right now or I'd give you the ID number regarding the wish list for includes. FrontPage Includes as they are called at the moment, a better name perhaps might be Design Time Includes, are still available in EW and new ones CAN be made. If you think about it logically all you have to do is insert the code and change the path. An easier way is to make a Code Snippet. This is outlined at: http://by-expression.com/quick-bits/includes/ and http://any-expression.com/expression-web/tutorials/insert-include-pages.htm The date stamp I've no idea on .... log in to connect make a wish list it on the ng with the id number and invite people to vote to keep it ... do the same on this thread. hth Tina

• Anonymous
  October 19, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  November 06, 2006
  When I tried to download templates for Word 2007 B2TR I got the warning that "Microsoft Expression Web Designer Beta 1" is not an original Microsoft product. The download has been refused, the linked website: http://r.officebeta.iponet.net/r/rlidOGAGetGenuine?clid=1031&ver=12&app=winword.exe&error=105 did not work. What to do?

• Anonymous
  November 28, 2006
  After much reading about the new product, I'm still a bit confused as to IF or WHAT is needed on the server that a site created in the new product would need.  It appears that this no longer needs FPSE but can run on it, seems to need ASP.NET 2.0 running on server, not sure if SharePoint is needed but don't think so. Uhm, clarity here? Some of us have to plan way in advance for budget purposes for upgrades and this is confusing. How about this: what is the recommended server configuration/requirements for a web site that is created with this product? Can that be clarified here or even better save other time with that added to the Expressions web site? Last but not least, in regards to budgeting, can someone get some information out there soon on pricing for this product? I'm in education and we have to have budget requisitions for our next school year (starting July 1, 2007) in before the end of THIS year!! We have spoken to people at Microsoft, vendors of MS products and so far no one seems to know anything about pricing yet do know that the new product is coming. This hurts those in situations like Education that have such budgeting cycles. We have to upgrade as I am assuming by August 2007 as student's won't be able to purchase FrontPage 2003 any longer yet how can we put in the request if no one has any idea on pricing? HELP!!!

• Anonymous
  December 21, 2006
  It makes sense to remove the often archaic, limited, and non-standard features that the FPSE bots made possible. It makes sense for this product to migrate former FrontPage users to web-standard solutions. But there is a stunning omission, that I don't understand why your marketing department isn't telling you: For each FP feature you remove, what is the migration plan and path? Per feature, a standards-based solution should be identified.  Plus add to the tool whatever you can to make migration easier from old solution to new solution. The best migration approach would be TRANSLATION: each old feature is translated into something that works without FPSE.  Presumably this would build on a combination of javascript on the client side, and ASP.NET or PHP on the server side. I believe that most of the people migrating from FP would accept an ASP.NET based solution.  It is essential that the solution be "standard" on the BROWSER side, but what is on the server side is less critical.  ASP.NET is a very powerful forward looking solution, and I can see customers accept Microsoft migrating them from the limited FPSE, which hasn't been updated since 2002, to a technology with strong long-term potential. If the development team does decide to start adding such feature-migration, I would like to be contacted -- because I have already started working out how much of this might be do-able as an add-in.  [Apologies for the self-promotion.]

• Anonymous
  December 21, 2006
  I forgot to say: And the MINIMUM approach is a TUTORIAL giving users step-by-step instructions for an equivalent solution using a combination of ASP.NET and javascript. I am not familiar with all the FrontPage FPSE features, but I will write a tutorial for some of them, at toolmakersteve.com/Expression-Web I would like to hear from anyone else who might be writing such migration tutorials or add-ins. -- Steve toolmakersteve98@shawstudioNO.SPAMcom

• Anonymous
  January 27, 2007
  Just in using Expression alongside FP I have to say it's a nice program, we only have one complaint internally that is hindering us from jumping from FP to Expression, "preview mode" is gone... I have talked w/ other designers / developers who are in agreement, this is a convenience that we have taken for granted in the past and now that's gone we miss it...  Any plans to bring it back?  The preview in a browser thing is okay for looking at a final product but designing on the fly it's definitely convenient even if it's not always "accurate"... Just my two cents, Cotton Rohrscheib, Partner Pleth Networks, LLC Powersite Design Group