Microsoft Expression Web

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

~ the obit ~

Microsoft Expression Web launched on December 4, 2006 as the standards-compliant successor to FrontPage. It was part of Expression Studio, a four-app suite (Web, Blend, Design, Encoder) aimed at the same designers Adobe had locked in with Macromedia. The pitch was clean. Real CSS. Real XHTML. No proprietary FrontPage Server Extensions. No shared borders. Microsoft was admitting in product form that FrontPage had embarrassed itself for a decade.

The problem was the timing. Dreamweaver CS3 shipped the same year under Adobe's freshly-finished Macromedia takeover, with the entire web-design world already trained on its workflow. Expression Web went up against muscle memory. It went through four versions in five years, picking up SuperPreview for cross-browser testing and PHP support, but never broke 5 percent of the WYSIWYG market. Microsoft eventually folded Blend into Visual Studio for the.NET crowd and left Web stranded on its own.

On December 20, 2012 Microsoft announced end of support, dropped the $149 price to zero, and posted Expression Web 4 as a free download. That is the marketing move companies make right before they admit nobody wanted it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was trying to fix ~

FrontPage shipped tables-for-layout HTML, vbscript event handlers, and proprietary server extensions that required IIS to render half the pages it generated. Designers who knew CSS could not stand it. Expression Web flipped the defaults. New pages opened with a doctype, an external stylesheet, semantic markup. The compatibility checker would yell at you if you wrote anything Internet Explorer 6 would handle but Firefox would not. For a 2006 Microsoft product that was, a small miracle.

~ why it lost ~

By 2007 the visual-design crowd was either deep in Dreamweaver or already moving to hand-coded workflows in TextMate, Coda, Aptana. Microsoft did not have a developer community for design tools the way Adobe had one for Photoshop refugees. The free release in December 2012 closed the loop. The product was good. The audience just never existed at the size Redmond needed.

~ what survived ~

Expression Web is the last serious attempt at a Microsoft-branded WYSIWYG html editor for designers. After 2012 the company stopped pretending it wanted that audience and let Visual Studio handle anything web-shaped. The free installer is still around if you want to see what a pre-Atom, pre-VS-Code Microsoft thought a 2010 web designer's daily app should look like.

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