I have a few sites that need a facelift. Should I do that now or wait
for the latest/greatest software? Is there likely to be desirable
features that would be "must-have"? TIA
The most desirable feature is the one buying the software.
You can use Microsoft Word to write and publish your own book, but you can't
use it to teach you good writing skills.
FrontPage can do a lot for you, but as you probably know, your understanding
of the WWW, HTML, and related topics is going to be your greatest asset. It
has lots of great productivity tools, and every version has features that
the previous version did not. So, your question is a good one, but not
easily answered in this case. Here's why:
There are a lot of things happening at Microsoft with the next generation of
MS software in general. Microsoft expects to release Windows Vista next
year, and it has a completely different underlying philosophy behind it.
Well, not completely different. Perhaps "a realization of concepts Microsoft
has been working towards for a long time" would be more accurate. But the
end result is going to be a much different Operating System and development
platform overall. the entire underlying architecture has been reworked.
Among the factors influencing Windows Vista, and other software being
released around the same time, is a committment to embrace standards that
are determined by organizations such as the W3C, ECMA, and ISO. As I
mentioned, this has been an ongoing endeavor with Microsoft, but is likely
to be nearly a complete reality with the next generation of Microsoft
software in general. For example, Internet Explorer 7 is slated to almost
completely embrace existing HTML and XHTML standards as defined by the W3C,
as well as existing CSS and XML standards. In the next version of the Office
System, Microsoft has re-designed all of the Office file formats to use XML,
rather than the proprietary binary formats now being used for the most part.
The GUI is being removed from the Operating System kernel, and will use
Managed (.Net) Direct3D vector graphics under the hood, instead of the
traditional Microsoft raster graphics. And Microsoft is introducing a new
GUI development language, XAML (eXtensible Application Markup Language),
which is a flavor of XML.
This overall change is going to affect just about all of the next generation
of Microsoft software versions, including FrontPage. How it will affect
FrontPage is not known as of yet, although there are any number of rumors
floating around. Still, Microsoft hasn't said much about the next versions
of the Office System family of software, beyond what I have outlined for
you, yet.
So, waiting for the next version of FrontPage would be something of a
gamble. It is not known when it will be released, or how it may have
changed, but you can be sure it will have changed quite a bit. If you wait
for it, I couldn't tell you how long you would have to wait.
But at least now you may be able to decide for yourself!
--
HTH,
Kevin Spencer
Microsoft MVP
..Net Developer
You can lead a fish to a bicycle,
but it takes a very long time,
and the bicycle has to *want* to change.
