Dreamweaver vs FrontPage, which is the best?

There are two major WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors available for beginners. These are: Microsoft FrontPage and Adobe (Former Macromedia) Dreamweaver. So the question is which one is the best?

I am not written this article not for intended to humiliate Dreamweaver or FrontPage editors. I just attempted to analyze both programs from different points, based on Internet research, experience of other users and my years of html coding experience.

Now the main fact is:

MS FrontPage:

---

1. FrontPage as all Microsoft product has so many templates and ready to use solutions that you cannot admit it is easier for beginner to start using FrontPage to build his first website. You can create simple website personal or business with several clicks and all you will need to do next is to enter your text and pictures instead of used by FrontPage by default.

2. The good news is FrontPage html pages look exactly as they appear in MS Internet Explorer and the bad news is that they look perfect ONLY in MS Internet Explorer. However you may program FrontPage to get rid of nasty tags but I believe it requires some hand coding to adjust pages to Netscape or Opera.

3. As Microsoft application FrontPage is better with ASP pages, which are standard for Windows based hosting and windows based programming.

4. MS FrontPage perfectly interacts with other MS Office products. For example you can easily cut and paste some chart from MS Excel into FrontPage working area.

5. By default MS FrontPage uses table with the fixed width and sometimes it can be a problem to make it display tables with percentage width.

Dreamweaver:

---

1. You can build your own templates and use them to edit hundreds of pages of your website with one single click. Although Dreamweaver adds some comment tags to html file to distinguish editable and non-editable areas and I read in one forum that people experience some troubles applying template to more than 700 pages as they ran out of memory but I had never chance to test that.

2. Pages done with Dreamweaver usually have less trash in coding. They look almost perfect with Mozilla Firefox, Netscape, Opera and MS Internet Explorer.

3. Dreamweaver doing amazing thing with SSI files and other server side include technology. PHP code looks much nicer however with ASP scripts FrontPage still better.

4. Dreamweaver is much better interacts with other Adobe & Macromedia products.

5. Both editors in most cases display CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) correctly. But if you enter style attribute twice in Dreamweaver for it will definitely ruin your page and you will be able preview your page partly before this error. FrontPage however handles such mistakes easily.

My idea is that MS FrontPage is ideal for beginners as it provides so much help and templates, then you should move to Dreamweaver when you feel yourself more comfortable with the html code and finally, if you are serious about web design, you should reach the hand coding level in notepad++as it still best way for coding pages. It gives you the freedom of using tags and styles, as you want them to use. Do not forget however validate you hand coding, or code generated with FrontPage or Dreamweaver. You will be surprised if you knew how many errors produced during coding starting from broken links to invalid tag attributes.