And while Expression Web may be a competitor for Dreamweaver, what we’ve seen of its Expression stable-mates doesn’t prompt the same kind of comparisons with their Adobe counterparts. That said, it’s hard to believe it’ll have the same depth of inter-relation as Dreamweaver has with both PhotoShop and Illustrator. This should mean you need to preview your latest edits less frequently, but when you do, you can choose from any browser available on your system.Įxpression Web is designed to integrate with the other components of the Expression Studio suite, but since none of these programs is beyond Release Candidate yet, it’s impossible to say how the tie-ins will compare with Adobe’s integration. One of the strengths Microsoft claims for the program is the accuracy of its web page rendering and it certainly handled the layouts we loaded without problems. To this extent, it reminds you to add captions to images so they can be read by text-to-speech browsers. You can also validate your new design against W3C accessibility guidelines which, among others, stipulate that sites should be readable by the visually impaired. However, it’s not just CSS and ASP.Net that Expression Web adheres to. This speeds up development and helps prevent silly syntax errors, which direct typing can inject into your code.ĭragging and dropping of ASP.Net objects onto your form is really quick and simple and includes some sophisticated examples like calendars and Wizards.
You can easily flick between design and code views and the code editor both checks lines as you enter them and offers an Intellisense drop-down list for completing commands with a couple of clicks. The palette enables you to view and change any of the properties of a given style in a very easy, more intuitive way than with its main rivals. It has none of the baggage Dreamweaver has to carry for legacy compatibility.ĬSS is certainly well handled and the CSS palette updates with new styles as you add and edit content. Expression Web is keyed on structure and Microsoft has taken the opportunity to design the program from the ground up as a standards-based editor.
This means preparing all the page elements, including basic graphics and photos, before you begin.
For example, selecting the target for a hyperlink is hidden behind a ‘Function’ button in the hyperlink dialog, which is by no means obvious.Įven with the training and the useful tabbed CSS Selector flip-cards, you need to think from the start like a professional designer. This is when you need to turn to the DVD-based training which, while a bit over-enthusiastically American for UK tastes, does cover a lot of useful material and several techniques specific to Expression Web. The supplied website templates are basic and you’re pretty soon left to your own devices.
There are no drawing tools or easy drag and drop positioning. The editing panes have toolbars at the top, mimicking something out of Word, and are bordered by palettes of CSS and tag properties with Adobe-style, diagonal-cut tabs.Įxpression Web isn’t a tool for the beginner. The main editing screen is a mixture of Dreamweaver and Office. NET Framework 2 if it’s not already installed.
To run Expression Web, you need to have Windows XP SP2 or Windows Server 2003 SP1 as a minimum, along with. The new program works by default with a two-pane, graphics and code paradigm (as Dreamweaver does) that tightly relates hard code to objects on the page so you can see the results of your edits as soon as you make them – WYSIWYG as some like to say. Instead it preferred to steer them towards a DTP way of working. FrontPage was more of a hand-holder and was, in some ways, reluctant to show HTML to the web designer. In fact, given Microsoft’s history with FrontPage, it’s quite a departure. It lines up fair and square against Adobe Dreamweaver but is more standards-based than the ex-Macromedia product.Įxpression Web is designed to make the most of ASP.Net but is happy to work with straight XHTML and is at home with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).
It’s part of the Expression Studio, which also includes Expression Design, Expression Media and Expression Blend, but is currently the only full product released.
Expression Web is Microsoft’s successor to FrontPage.