FrontPage Express

» see microsoft.com/ie/frontpage as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

frontpage express was already on my windows 98 install around 1999. i did not have to install it, it came in with internet explorer. you opened it from the programs menu and started typing on a fresh new page. font and color buttons sat in a toolbar across the top. it saved as.htm and i had no idea what html was yet.

this is how a lot of people in turkey, and i would guess most of the world running ie at the time, met html. the chain was simple. windows 98 came with internet explorer. internet explorer came with frontpage express one menu away inside the accessory folder. you saved a.htm file and uploaded it to a free personal homepage on geocities or angelfire. nobody was reading the spec, nobody needed to.

the program itself was a stripped version of frontpage 97. no webs, no site management, just one page at a time. that suited the user base. most people who opened it made one page about themselves and a page of links, maybe an animated gif before they got bored.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was ~

frontpage express was the result of microsoft buying vermeer technologies in early 1996 and deciding that html editing should be a windows-bundled feature. the full frontpage went into office. the cut-down express went into ie. the strategy mirrored outlook express, which shipped with ie at the same time and carried the same naming pattern.

the editor used a wysiwyg canvas with a code-view tab. it supported tables and forms, plus embedded images and a few activex controls of the era. it could not publish to a server on its own without the frontpage server extensions. but most home users were just copying the.htm files to their isp's personal-space ftp account or pasting them into the geocities web uploader.

~ the decline ~

frontpage express was never updated past version 2.0, the one that shipped with ie 4 in late 1997. ie 5.0 in march 1999 and ie 5.5 in june 2000 carried the same binary. by then dreamweaver had become the editor people who took web design seriously moved to, and the windows-bundled editor felt increasingly like a toy.

internet explorer 6 launched on 24 august 2001 without frontpage express included. microsoft did not announce a discontinuation. the download page on microsoft.com simply went quiet, and the binary stayed available through shareware mirrors for years.

~ what remains ~

a lot of the early-2000s personal homepages preserved on archive.org were saved out of frontpage express. you can tell by the <meta name="generator" content="microsoft frontpage express"> line in the head. font tags and table-based layouts give it away too. it taught more first-website users than dreamweaver and notepad combined, then disappeared without a memorial.

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