FrontPage used to pride itself on its almost code-free approach to Web design, but not any more. Top of the new coding features is the Split View, which combines layout and HTML views. There are also improved code formatting and Auto-complete features, providing a drop-down list of context-sensitive options as you type. Auto-complete also handles regularly reused code snippets and works with HTML, CSS, XSL, JavaScript, JScript, VBScript and ASP .NET, which are all directly editable.
FrontPage's WYSIWYG features have been boosted, and you can now load a background image in Design view to help set up your page grid. Plus, table handling features two new Task Panes to help format cells.
Layouts can now be designed using CSS-based absolute positioning with FrontPage's new Insert | Layer command, which lets you interactively resize, position and arrange multiple overlapping layers. HTML tables are still a safer layout option, but layers come into their own for scripting. FrontPage's script handling has been revamped, with the new Behaviours Task Pane providing pre-supplied scripts to manage visibility, formatting and so on at run-time. By now, it should be clear that almost every new feature has been lifted in some fashion from Dreamweaver.
Further Dreamweaver inspiration is apparent in the publishing features. The Remote Site view lets you see files on the server and synchronise sites. Workgroup collaboration is boosted by support for file locking via WebDAV or LCK files on FTP servers. Another sign of FrontPage's belated conversion to the open mainstream is that it hasn't added new Web Components requiring proprietary server extensions. However, you can still extend FrontPage if your site is hosted on Windows Server 2003 with SharePoint Services. This lets you set up Web logs, issue tracking lists and news and reviews sites easily. More importantly, you can build data-driven sites based on XML, Web Services and OLEDB data sources. Once the link is made, you may apply pre-built Data views or manually format your data. If you do the latter, FrontPage automatically creates a fully editable XSLT transform to apply to all your data.
It is a major upgrade, but non-professional users might be intimidated by the emphasis on code, while professionals will stick with Dreamweaver.