# Has anyone Tried New Microsoft Expression Web...?



## Suzzistar (Apr 25, 2007)

Has anyone tried using all new MS expression web..? product experts say that its a software made to design websites with clean/correct code unlike MS FrontPage or any other web designing software for that matter.

Pls share your experience with us if anyone has already used MS expression web


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## Pistoff (Oct 5, 2004)

I was a beta tester on that software a couple of years ago for Microsoft. I find the Share Point designer works much easier.


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## Suzzistar (Apr 25, 2007)

Pistoff said:


> I was a beta tester on that software a couple of years ago for Microsoft. I find the Share Point designer works much easier.


How abt the code? Can u getta w3c complaint code which is 100% accurate from sharepoint or even Expression web coz that's wot i wanna knw, and that's wot matters at the end


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## DianeHelen (Sep 16, 2007)

Expression WEb is MS answer to all the bad press it got for Front Page. While some of Front Page was really nice, it had both code errors, standards compliancy problems, and security problems.

MS came out with EW bllled as the first and most standards compliant for XHTML and CSS.

I do like much of it, but true to form with MS, find lots to ***** and moan about as well. When you work in the design mode, it writes virtually ALLL the code in CSS. So while yes it IS standards based, its a bit trickier for the newer web developer (which most of my clients are) to go in and tweak via code. 

But the feature I just LOVE with this tool, is the ability to create and work in Templates. Also the really cool feature to use a tracer image to visually line up your page templates. 

The next release of IIS wlll no longer support FPSE, so EW is sorta the transitional tool to get everyone use to going back to actually writing server side scripts for our dynamic data.

I use this tool, and teach it as well. The did however take away one of favorite tools that FP had, and that was the table draw tool, The Help files are AWEFUL and in fact, still say the table draw tool is there, but its NOT! 

All in all not a bad product, other than typically MS constraining..


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## tomdkat (May 6, 2006)

Wow, this product surprises me since I didn't think MS really cared about web standards much. Go figure. 

Does this article help any?

Peace...


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## DianeHelen (Sep 16, 2007)

Yeah, well they took a lot of heat, with Front Page over the standards issue as well as other issues. So I guess they figured it was time to address some of it.

Sometimes, it drives me a bit nuts, that its SOOOO standards based, its hard to just GUI simple HTML without going into the code view to tweak.


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## tomdkat (May 6, 2006)

DianeHelen said:


> Yeah, well they took a lot of heat, with Front Page over the standards issue as well as other issues. So I guess they figured it was time to address some of it.


 Now if only the IE group would get in gear.... 



> Sometimes, it drives me a bit nuts, that its SOOOO standards based, its hard to just GUI simple HTML without going into the code view to tweak.


Interesting. I use Kompozer and am able to do a lot using the GUI interface without having to view the source (unless I'm copying it to paste here or something).

I'm very interested in the MS app though and I think I'll give it a try.

Peace...


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## Pistoff (Oct 5, 2004)

It seems that all here have pros and cons on this software. Again - has anyone tried Share Point Designer? I find it better! 
I have no trouble with this against cross-browsers.


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## tomdkat (May 6, 2006)

I haven't tried Share Point Designer either but I'm VERY curious to see the HTML & CSS generated by MS Expression Web.

Peace...


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## tomdkat (May 6, 2006)

Ok, I've installed trial versions of DreamWeaver CS3 and Expression Web (12.0.4518.1014) and created a simple web page using CSS for the styling. I did NOT access the HTML source during the page development *AT ALL* with ONE exception: I could not figure out how to change the DOCTYPE in Expression Web so I accessed the source to make that change manually. Considering I've spent LESS than an hour with Expression Web, I won't hold this against Expression Web. This was my first time touching both DreamWeaver CS3 and Expression Web.

I also loaded this CSS page layout template into both DWCS3 and EW to see how each one would deal with that CSS page layout. I also used Kompozer for this test as my reference point.

To help keep all this organized, I'll post screenshots in separately grouped posts. I'll post the shots of Kompozer in one post, DWCS3 in another post, and EW in a third post. I'll post the HTML generated by each tool along with the screenshots.

Peace...


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## tomdkat (May 6, 2006)

Ok, here is the output from Kompozer, my "reference" web design tool.

Attached are a screenshots of the Dynamic Drive CSS layout I linked to above loaded in Kompozer as well as of the test page I created with Kompozer loaded in Firefox 2.0.0.7 on Windows XP.

Here is the HTML code Kompozer generated:

```
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
  <meta content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="content-type">
  <title>CSS web page design test</title>
  <style type="text/css">
.pagebody {
  display: block;
  width: 800px;
  height: 600px;
  margin-left: auto;
  margin-right: auto;
  background-image: url(images/background.png);
  background-position: center;
  background-repeat: no-repeat;
  margin-top: 10%;
}

.pagetext {
  display: block;
  padding-top: 20px;
  margin-left: 20px;
  height: 95%;
  width: 92.5%;
}


  </style>
</head>
<body style="background-image: url(images/granite.jpg);">
<div class="pagebody">
<div class="pagetext">Text</div>
</div>

</body>
</html>
```
 The DOCTYPE in the HTML above is the default DOCTYPE when creating a new page in Kompozer.

Peace...


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## tomdkat (May 6, 2006)

Ok, here are screenshots of the Dynamic Drive layout loaded in DWCS3 and the page I created in DWCS3 loaded in Firefox. I found DWCS3 a bit easier to use/navigate than Expression Web and the page generated with DWCS3 behaved in Firefox exactly the same as the Kompozer generated page. I was able change the DOCTYPE in DWCS3 to the one Kompozer used *without* touching any HTML source. 

Here is the HTML DWCS3 generated:

```
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
<title>CSS web page design test</title>
<style type="text/css">
<!--
body {
	background-image: url(images/granite.jpg);
}
.pagebody {
	background-image: url(images/background.png);
	background-repeat: no-repeat;
	background-position: center;
	display: block;
	height: 600px;
	width: 800px;
	margin-right: auto;
	margin-left: auto;
	margin-top: 10%;
}
.pagetext {
	display: block;
	height: 95%;
	width: 92%;
	margin-left: 20px;
	padding-top: 20px;
}
-->
</style>
</head>

<body>
<div class="pagebody">
  <div class="pagetext">Text</div>
</div>
</body>

</html>
```
 I still don't know why the Dynamic Drive layout looks so bad but whatever. 

Peace...


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## tomdkat (May 6, 2006)

Ok, here is the output from Expression Web. I was able to figure out how to create my test page ok but it wasn't as easy as it was in DWCS3. I couldn't figure out how to change the DOCTYPE from XHTML 1.0 Transitional to HTML 4.01 Strict, so I made that DOCTYPE change in the HTML file manually by editing the source in Expression Web.

Here is the code EW generated (minus my DOCTYPE change):

```
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-us" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>CSS web page design test</title>
<style type="text/css">
.pagebody {
	background-image: url('images/background.png');
	background-repeat: no-repeat;
	width: 800px;
	height: 600px;
	margin-right: auto;
	margin-left: auto;
	margin-top: 10%;
	background-position: center;
	display: block;
}
.pagetext {
	width: 92%;
	height: 95%;
	left: 20px;
	padding: 20px;
	border: 1px none red;
}
</style>
</head>

<body style="background-image: url('images/granite.jpg'); background-attachment: fixed; max-width: 800px; max-height: 600px">

<div class="pagebody">
	<div class="pagetext">
		Text</div>

</div>

</body>

</html>
```
 I don't know why the gray image isn't centered but that might be related to my originally coding the page with the XHTML 1.0 Transitional DOCTYPE.

EDIT: Ok, I figured out why the image isn't centered. It's the "max-width" and "max-height" settings. I couldn't find how to set the "width/height" of the DIV with the gray background and ended up setting the max-height/max-width settings on the page body, by mistake. I removed the styling on the "body" tag and now the Expression Web version behaves like the other versions.

Peace...


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## essence702 (Oct 19, 2005)

I downloaded the 60 day trial version of E/W. It stopped working after about 3 weeks. I was in the learning phase and would really like to have more time to evaluate this product. I'm not sure I want to invest in E/W because I did get stuck trying to figure out forms handling or aspx procedures. Anyone know why the trial period stopped after 3 weeks?

Thank you


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## tomdkat (May 6, 2006)

When I did my evaluation, either DreamWeaver or ExpressionWeb gave me a limited number of program starts, like 30 or so. Unfortunately, I don't remember which one gave me this limitation.

Maybe it was ExpressionWeb and that's the threshold you hit, meaning you were given 30 program starts within 60 days to try out the software. 

Have you contacted Microsoft about your trial period?

Peace...


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## essence702 (Oct 19, 2005)

Thanks for your reply, your theory sounds reasonable. I wish I could understand more about forms handlers. In particular whether or not you need both the form.htm and the .aspx file in your web, or does the .aspx file eliminate the need for the form.htm? Sounds like you're an experienced designer; which program (Expression Web or Dreamweaver) would you recommend for a beginner? I've tried the e/w tutorial site and even copied and pasted their test code, but I'm still having problems knowing what to do with the forms properties like get, post and action. My test seem to fail due to those elements coded incorrectly.

Thanks
essence


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## tomdkat (May 6, 2006)

I wouldn't consider myself an "experienced web designer" at all, but a novice who is learning as much as I can as quickly as I can. 

I'm not an ASP person so I don't know how ASP fits in with your form but generally speaking, you'll need SOME kind of form that is displayed in the browser for people to fill out. This can be a static (non-changing) HTML page (.htm file) or it can be a dynamically generated page generated by ASP or PHP or whatever. This page will contain the HTML form the user completes. 

When they click the "submit" button, normally that invokes a server side script or program to process the form data. This could be a PHP or ASP script, it could be a Perl script or a compiled executable, etc. This server side script or program gets the form data and does something with it (e-mail it to someone, store it in a database, etc).

So, for starters I would create a static HTML page (.htm file) with a HTML form on it and have the "submit" button invoke a server side PHP or ASP script to process the form data. Use of the "POST" method is common since it makes the form data readily available in the environment on the server in which the script will run.

Does that help any?

Peace...


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## Fyzbo (Feb 6, 2002)

.aspx pages act a bit differently then other scripting languages. They always have one form on the page. Asp.net controls such as an asp:button have events that connect with serverside functions. So the onclick of an asp:button actually runs serverside code.

This means that aspx pages almost always post to themselves. So you should not need additional pages and in my experience you will never need an htm file with a form on it.


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## essence702 (Oct 19, 2005)

Thanks so much. I just d/l and installed Dreamweaver trial. I will play around with it an see what happens. I see it cost quite a bit more than E/W. I let you know my thoughts about it. Thanks again for your help. Have a good day!

Essence


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## namenotfound (Apr 30, 2005)

DianeHelen said:


> MS came out with EW bllled as the first and most standards compliant for XHTML and CSS.


That seems a little odd that they'd make it XHTML compliant when their own Internet Explorer doesn't even support _correct_ XHTML usage.


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## tomdkat (May 6, 2006)

Fyzbo said:


> .aspx pages act a bit differently then other scripting languages. They always have one form on the page. Asp.net controls such as an asp:button have events that connect with serverside functions. So the onclick of an asp:button actually runs serverside code.
> 
> This means that aspx pages almost always post to themselves. So you should not need additional pages and in my experience you will never need an htm file with a form on it.


Ah, ok. Thanks for the clarification. 

Peace...


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