OY2K Integration Anxiety
By Dale Dougherty
We were wrong," said Microsoft FrontPage 2000's product manager, Priscilla Mistele. Microsoft thought that most people would not care about seeing HTML, even less editing the code. When they surveyed over 1100 customers, 80 percent told them that hand-coding HTML was important. Microsoft changed FrontPage so that the new version, which is now targeting professional and office users, is happy to show you the HTML it produces. Like Dreamweaver, FrontPage lets you edit the HTML directly and it promises not to garble the code. What Macromedia calls "round-trip HTML," Microsoft calls "HTML preservation."
A Microsoft engineer who worked on the HTML preservation feature presented FrontPage 2000 at David Coursey's Showcase '99. Coursey commented that he couldn't understand why people want to hand-code HTML. He couldn't understand why, when he prepared documents for his conference Web site and gave them to his staff to put on the site, they promptly stripped out all the HTML he had created in a visual editor and started hand-editing it themselves. Jokingly, he called them morons.
Are we morons for wanting to stay so close to the code? It's a basic rule of Web pages -- it doesn't matter how great your page looks in an authoring program. It's the code that matters. HTML authors belong to the coalition of coders. On our resumes, we cite our proficiency in writing code, not in using authoring programs.
We don't want to be separated from our HTML because HTML means independence and interoperability.
