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Frontpage2002

eXPerience Frontpage
Microsoft's .Net Solution Saga Continues…

Feb. 25, 2001 - CEBU CITY –

You know about the Vermeer story right? Never heard of Vermeer? Really? So the story goes, as I am usually lounging around with others who have migrated into the vast world of the web, these questions generally come up… Vermeer was the company who silently pioneered FrontPage, and was quietly and expeditiously merged into "the empire" at Microsoft. It evolved into two key MS technologies, the Personal Web Server (PWS) and FrontPage, now widely utilized at homes worldwide as a key component of Office 2000.
Alas the story continues, as I tread the waters deeper and find other so-called web developers around Cebu creating pages and sites for the vastness of the net. I usually silently snicker inside as they tell me how they learned FrontPage at "so and so" institution and have been a professional web developer ever since. Rest assured, I think to myself, they'll be attending a class or two of mine soon… However, not for nothing, us professional developers (you know these guys, the ones who are making integrated solutions for the guy next down AND several [er, thousand] kilometers away.) usually have little to do with FrontPage nowadays.
FrontPage, long ago the "cream of the crop" silently sits in wait as we tear away with apps such as Ultradev 4, 1st Page, Flash 5, Adobe PhotoShop, XML-Spy, and the Top Style CSS editor. Us "big boys" are playing with such things as .asp, .php, ColdFusion, ActionScript, XSLT, and a myriad of other acronyms that will leave your head spinning. On top of that, we're all scrambling to learn more Java (for server pages and COM building), PowerBuilder, and of course, XHTML. This is not to the fault of FrontPage , it still is functional, but has lost it's functionality as we deal with interactive web sites and most (over 85%) of the servers in Cebu can't run FrontPage's Server Extensions (That's what JavaScript is for anyway you...