Microsoft FrontPage (product review)

After all these years -- and despite some of the bad things I've written about Microsoft and Windows in the past -- and all the people that laugh at me for using it, FrontPage is still my favorite HTML WYSIWYG editor.

As HTML editing/authoring tools go it's pretty easy to learn, and I like the WYSIWYG editor for at least three reasons. First, it really is WYSIWYG. Creating tables seems to bring down most WYSIWYG tools, but in FrontPage this is a no-brainer. Second, it generates very clean, well-formatted HTML code behind the scenes. Third, you can modify that HTML, and generally-speaking FrontPage doesn't re-format your HTML after you've made those changes (like it used to in the pre-2000 versions).

Now, when it comes to the final nitty-gritty HTML details -- those source code things you adjust right before going live -- that's when I bail out of FrontPage and use a plain old text editor. But until then, I use FrontPage.

Unfortunately Microsoft whacked FrontPage as of 2006, and they're replacing it with two other products, SharePoint Designer and Expression Web, which I haven't looked at yet.