Microsoft FrontPage

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

~ the eulogy ~

frontpage shipped as a vermeer technologies product in november 1995. microsoft bought vermeer in january 1996 for about $130 million and turned the editor into a flagship piece of the office suite. the pitch was that anyone who could use word could build a website. you opened the program, got a blank page that looked like a word document, typed your headline, dragged in an image, hit publish, and the site went up to whatever server your isp gave you. for a stretch of the late 1990s and early 2000s frontpage was the most common way an ordinary person built their first webpage.

the program was tied closely to microsoft's server stack. it shipped with a thing called frontpage server extensions that sat on top of iis or apache and let you upload pages, manage forms, and run hit counters without writing any backend code. the server extensions were also where the trouble started: they were proprietary and often misconfigured, sometimes left open as security holes. by frontpage 2003 microsoft had quietly moved the product toward standard ftp and webdav, but the server-extensions reputation never fully went away.

i used frontpage around 2000 to 2003. dial-up at home in turkey, 33.6k modem on ttnet, the office cd somewhere in the house. it was the first program i used to make an actual webpage that other people could load. the visual editor produced enormous html files with nested tables and inline styles, and you learned pretty quickly that view source was full of microsoft-specific tags nobody else's tools knew about. by the time i moved to writing html by hand in notepad, i had already built two or three frontpage sites and learned what a hyperlink was through clicking the small chain icon in its toolbar.

~ the dossier ~

~ the curtain ~

microsoft announced the end in late 2006. frontpage was discontinued and split into two successor products that shipped alongside office 2007. expression web took the design-professional half of the audience and pushed standards-compliant html and css. sharepoint designer took the business-intranet half and stayed tied to the sharepoint stack. neither product was as broadly aimed as frontpage had been, and neither inherited the mass audience that had used the original to build personal sites.

the deeper reason was that the web had moved past the wysiwyg desktop editor. by 2006 most people who wanted a personal site were using blogger or wordpress. small businesses were buying templates from godaddy. the category of "person opens a desktop program, builds a website, ftp uploads it" had shrunk to a niche. frontpage's core market had been absorbed by hosted blogging tools and by the early cms platforms, and microsoft had no reason to keep maintaining a desktop product whose users had already left for the browser.

~ what it left ~

the "made with frontpage" aesthetic. nested tables for layout, marquee tags scrolling across the top of the page, an animated gif of an under-construction sign, a hit counter at the bottom in courier new. that was the visual signature of late 90s and early 2000s small-site web, and frontpage was the tool most responsible for shipping it. by the late 2000s the look was a punchline, but for several years it was simply what an ordinary website looked like.

the path from desktop to browser. frontpage was the bridge between making documents in word and making pages on the web. it taught a lot of people that a webpage was a thing you could edit yourself, not something only programmers built. the tool died, but the assumption it spread, that an ordinary person can publish a site, kept moving forward into geocities, then livejournal and blogger, then wordpress and squarespace.

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