1/31/2024 0 Comments Frontpage web editorAnd at the end of the day, the web itself was the real winner.Ī twice monthly dispatch about the web's history, the incredible people that built it, and all the websites, code, and browsers you've never heard of. On the floor of Macworld Expo, there were many debates about web standards, and WYSIWYG vs text editors, and the newest proprietary HTML tags. In the years to come, FrontPage became many a user’s introduction to web publishing.īut no one knew that in 1996. Making a web page became as easy as creating a document in Microsoft Word. FrontPage rode the wave of the web’s popularity, and stayed ahead of the curve. FrontPage resembled a document editor more than a design or development tool, and created it’s own niche: web authoring. Unlike most of it’s competition that tailored their products to web developers, FrontPage was specifically built for amateurs. There were plenty of HTML editors at Macworld, but it would be FrontPage that was the true game changer. FrontPage, on the other hand, had no Mac support yet. Earlier in the year, Microsoft had announced Internet Explorer for Mac (and a year later, Jobs would declare this to be Mac’s default browser). Microsoft had just purchased FrontPage from Vermeer Technologies, and had begun rolling it out on their own operating system. By 1998, Claris released version 3.0 of Home Page and soon after, discontinued the software.īut if you were really in know back then in 1996, you would have noticed that there was a brand new editor missing from the group: FrontPage. Unfortunately, things wouldn’t last long for Home Page. It was a bit clunky out the gate, but that day on the floor, they were promising some great new features. Home Page came bundled with a toolbar that let you easily create tables and frames without touching a single line of code. It had built in support for Netscape-only tags, so you could edit fonts and colors and images and your site would look great (in Netscape at least).įinally, Claris Home Page debuted at the Expo. But GoLive’s real edge was that it leaned into Netscape, hard. But in 1996, they were showing off GoLive 1.0, one of the first editors on the market to make heavy use of drag and drop functionality. In 1999, GoNet would be acquired by Adobe and eventually give way to a little piece of software called Dreamweaver. GoNet was demoing its new product GoLive. It was just about the only tool on the market that gave you complete visual freedom.įloating around the expo were also a couple of newcomers. Page Mill 2.0 would mess with your code, but semantics be damned. Forget a text editor, PageMill 2.0 let you move elements around, drop background images in, change colors with a color picker, and probably most importantly, add a table or frame-based grid. Page Mill 2.0 stepped things up from the previous version, and now everything was visual. They were releasing PageMill version 2 as a public beta, and they brought their A game. Not much news from the team, but 3.0 was due sometime very, very soon.Īdobe, on the other hand, had some very big news buzzing around the expo. But it made editing standards-compliant websites a lot simpler. This was before CSS, so those styles weren’t actually transferable. Its hot feature was a “Tags-On” view which took a structured document and made it way easier to read. HoTMeTaL was a WYSIWYG editor (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get), and kept things pretty visual. Peel yourself away from the BBEdit demo, and HoTMeTaL was waiting for you next. If you stopped by their booth, you could check out BBEdit 4.0.1, which let you save files directly to your web server. In 1994, the editor released HTMLExtensions that included syntax highlighting, quick browser previews and built-in templates, soon introducing those as core features. BBEdit was a text editor, plain and simple. Bare Bones had been putting out BBEdit since 1992. If you were looking for the largest booth of the bunch, that probably belonged to Bare Bones Software. Taking a walk through Macworld Expo that day was a crash course in the latest editor features and the great debate between text and WYSIWYG. Consequently, Boston’s World Trade Center was packed wall to wall with the latest and greatest HTML editors. In June of 1996, that number jumped to almost 260,000 (for those following along, that’s a 1000% increase). In June of 1995 there were around 23,000 websites. It wouldn’t be until a year later that Steve Jobs would make his return, and sales were at an all time low.īut it was an excellent time for the web. Let’s go back to 1996, in Boston, at the annual Macworld Expo.
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