In a lot of ways, people during this era of the internet were looking for a single solution to a complicated problem. Magazines of the era were often filled with roundups of different editors that pledged to make it easier for you to make webpages. Granted, it was par for the course during that time for web editors to not work as advertised. “This implicit comparison of these programs to dogs is actually not particularly fair to the canine population in fact, dogs are quite fussy about where they poop, while WYSIWYG editors don't appear to show this degree of discretion.” “In the main menu of this site, I refer to WYSIWYG editors as ‘not very well housebroken,’” the website states. “To be specific about Microsoft, the Internet Explorer 2.0 beta that's come out has several HTML tags that are proprietary to their browser and are not supported by Netscape,” he was quoted as saying just months before Microsoft bought the company.ĭaniel Tobias, the author of the early HTML-coding site Dan’s Web Tips, has an entire page dedicated to the useless tags, the useless characters, the unnecessary tags around meaningless pieces of code, the broken syntax added by apps like FrontPage. This became more of a problem after Microsoft had its grip into FrontPage, admittedly, but it was a problem Forgaard, at least, was aware could potentially happen ahead of time. In fact, FrontPage often created code that worked perfectly with Internet Explorer, but broke with every other web client. The company’s strategy pulled from Microsoft’s own playbook, and on top of that, the app was seemingly designed to plug right into the Office suite as if Microsoft had designed it itself.īut the app, while innovative for its time, came with numerous headaches, not the least of which was the messy code it created. The real problem with FrontPage: Its cluttered code created lock-in for MicrosoftįrontPage was pretty much the perfect app for a company like Microsoft to acquire in 1996. They aimed for something big, but they were about to get something even bigger.Ī screenshot of FrontPage Express, a basic version of FrontPage included with some versions of Internet Explorer. By the end of that year, the company had worked out contracts with Fidelity, Merrill Lynch, and Tribune Media to use the software. Vermeer had a completed first version of what would become FrontPage in just a handful of months. If that sounds a lot like what Microsoft did to Netscape during the browser wars, you know your internet history. The idea behind this strategy, he wrote, was “to create ‘lock-in’ to our product and architecture so that neither users nor the industry could easily switch to a competitor.” Vermeer, which had no other products besides FrontPage, took advantage of the gaps in the original web specification, however, to introduce some de facto standards of its own regarding server architecture. In part, it reflected the fact that Berners-Lee had not designed the Web architecture with mere mortals or PC applications in mind. In part, it was the result of our extremely ambitious goals. In part, this is just the way servers work. The problem was that, no matter what Andy and Randy tried, Web technology dictated that many of the functions we wanted to provide, like text-search engines, had to run alongside the Web server. Our lives would have been far simpler if we could have written just a shrink-wrapped PC application like Word. Vermeer’s early employees-beyond Ferguson, who wasn’t a technical employee, there was fellow co-founder Randy Forgaard, along with technical employees Andy Schulert and Peter Amstein-saw the way the wind was going with the Web, but were slightly less excited about the prospects of building around a system where the prevailing operating system on the market was an afterthought. That’s where the FrontPage strategy came into play. So his company looked to pave the highway in a way that was a little closer to where users were at the time. The problem was, however, that the roads were really hard to use at the time. He really wanted to pave the internet with a method for sharing information online.īut Tim Berners-Lee had already done that, and his idea for doing this, which he called the World Wide Web, was just starting to take off at the time that Ferguson, then a consultant and academic, was looking to start a company. “You can't become the industry standard unless your product covers every major portion of the market.”Ĭharles Ferguson’s initial goal wasn’t to build a product that built webpages. (via ) FrontPage was created to jump on the information superhighway and build the roads
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