The FrontPage Editor

The Microsoft FrontPage Editor is a tool for creating, designing, and editing World Wide Web pages. As you add text, images, tables, form fields, and other elements to your page, the FrontPage Editor displays them as they would appear in a Web browser.

You do not need to learn HTML to use the FrontPage Editor because it creates all the HTML code for you. The FrontPage Editor generates all the popular HTML tags, including extensions such as cascading style sheets, frames, and ActiveX Controls.

If you want to edit the HTML code directly, you can use the FrontPage Editor’s HTML view. In this view, you can enter text, edit HTML tags, and use standard word-processing commands such as cutting, pasting, and find and replace.
Although it is a powerful tool, the FrontPage Editor is easy to use because of its familiar, word-processor interface.
Here are some of the key features of the FrontPage Editor:

You can create new HTML pages based on page wizards and templates. The FrontPage Editor offers many choices of page formats, and you can create your own templates.
You can apply one of the many FrontPage themes, created by professional designers, to give your pages a dynamic, colourful appearance. You can also add and design borders for your pages and insert navigation bars, which guide your users around your Web site.
You can open any HTML file in the FrontPage Editor and all the HTML tags on the page are preserved. You can also open files of many popular types, and the FrontPage Editor converts them to HTML. Some of the file types you can open are Microsoft Word 2.0 and 6.0, Microsoft Word 6.0 for MS-DOS, Microsoft Word 95 and 97, Microsoft Excel 4.0 and 5.0, Microsoft Excel 95 and 97, and WordPerfect 6.x. The FrontPage Editor preserves hyperlinks from Microsoft Office 97 documents.
You can insert text in all HTML styles, create multilevel lists, change text size and colour, and apply formatting such as centring a heading or making text italic. Using cascading style sheet support, you can control margins, line spacing, colours, fonts faces and sizes.
Using a point-and-click interface, you can create hyperlinks to pages and files in your FrontPage web or to pages and files on the World Wide Web. Point to a page and FrontPage creates the correct hyperlink syntax for you automatically.
You can insert an image of almost any type, and the FrontPage Editor converts it into GIF or JPEG format. Double-click an image and it opens for editing in your favourite image-editing program. Create an image map by adding hotspots, areas in an image containing hyperlinks. Using FrontPage image-editing commands, you can crop, rotate, and resize an image, make it black and white, give it bevelled edges, and change its brightness and contrast. FrontPage includes the Microsoft Clip Gallery, a large library of clip art, stock photos, and video clips.
You can create forms containing text fields, check boxes, radio buttons, drop-down lists, and push buttons. When you create a form, the default FrontPage form handler automatically saves form information to a file or sends it to an e-mail address. You can select from a set of FrontPage form handlers or add you own custom form handler to a form.
Using the FrontPage table-editing commands, you can create a table, insert rows and columns, align them, and create background colours, using a point-and-click interface.
You can add powerful functionality to your page by inserting FrontPage components. They add interactive features such as navigation bars, threaded discussion groups, full-text searches, and form handlers that would otherwise require complex programming. For example, the Table of Contents component automatically creates an HTML outline of your FrontPage web with hyperlinks to each page, and the Banner Ad Manager replays a sequence of images using effects similar to a rotating billboard.
You can create new frames pages, edit the appearance of your frames, and assign initial pages to each frame, all using a point-and click interface. FrontPage displays your frames pages in WYSIWYG style and generates the HTML.
You can insert ActiveX Controls, plug-ins, and Java applets in the FrontPage Editor. You can launch a script-editing session and create and insert JavaScript scripts and Microsoft Visual Basic Scripting Edition scripts.