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Sunday, June 20, 1999 FATHER'S Day
I continue to investigate. I now get mail saying that SP 4 for NT 4 has been a problem for many people.
Perhaps, but I got SP 4 will I nill I when I did the Y2K upgrade here. Perhaps Windows 2000 is better? In any event,
DO NOT USE Office 2000 with SP 4 NT 4, and in particular don't use FP 2000 with it. More than that as I find out
more.
This is still Visual Page, but it's not going to be my final. I have written for HOt Metal Pro 5.0 and we will
see how that works. I am also being seduced by Dreamweaver people and that may yet be what I need. I do like having:
- date/time stamp bots
- keeping a list of pages altered for "publish"
- keeping track of which directory things are in for "publish"
Those are the main things; Front Page did them well and FP 98 still would if I could use it, but once
NT4 SP 4 gets wind of 2000 FP extensions it will NEVER go back to FP 98 again, or so I have found.
Another reason to abandon Visual Page as soon as I can: I format stuff with fonts in WORD and cut and paste,
and it is all in DEFAULT FONT when it gets into Visual Page, which has an editor that selects badly and scrolls
horribly. Sigh. I miss FP 98 a lot.
OVER IN MAIL I GOT A LETTER accusing me of being inconsistent. I wrote a long reply.
I should print the reply here but it's long, and why increase download times for this?
I have included that here to avoid having to have the 53a page:
This is a long answer to a good letter. The answer was
also put into VIEW.
In light of the following quotes (and
earlier problems you have had), especially the last quote, I just have to ask:
Have you actually used Dreamweaver, Hot Metal or GoLive? Do they work? As far as
I can tell from 'View' you have used 2 versions of FrontPage and Visual Page,
neither works, yet you continue to suggest FrontPage is (mostly) ok. Huh?
Please remember that you have resources, contacts, and internet-wide help that
almost none of your readers have; that we have to have a working solution, not a
continual hack; and that we buy our software. If FrontPage doesn't work, fine.
You "do all these silly things so [we] won't have to...". Now, tell us
what does work. If you continue hammering hacks and fixes and undocumented
tweaks onto FrontPage and get it to kinda, sorta work most of the time, don't be
surprised if I, and others, continue to think you an apologist for Microsoft.
If it doesn't work, dump it and use a program that does work, and tell us. That
is useful and helpful.
Hope whatever solution you find works better than in the past.
Scott
Quotes from you in one week:
"I can no longer recommend Front Page 98, and my apologies to anyone I may
have led into trying it. My advice is GET OUT NOW if you still have a small
enough site."
"With any luck I am going to be able to get out of Front Page altogether
and into some other kind of Web Design software. Understand, I don't really LIKE
doing that. Front Page, while I had a smaller web, did work; and it did sort of
publish; and it did sort of do things for me. But once it decided to die, it
decided to DIE."
"DO NOT INSTALL FRONT PAGE 2000. You may never get FP 98 working again. And
if you have not got stuck with Front Page then DON'T. Try something else. Try
almost ANYTHING else. I may change my mind another time, and I may not."
"I am pretty disgusted with web tools. If Front Page worked, it would still
be the best of the bad lot I have worked with; but in fact it doesn't
work."
I suppose that's a fair assessment, so let me try to be more coherent.
First, I don't recommend Front Page if you plan a large web. However, Front
Page works very well with small webs. I have no exact definition of small: it
involves not merely number of pages, but number of hyperlinks, and both of those
are more important than sheer size in megabytes.
But as you get up to where my site is in size and complexity, THE FRONT PAGE
EXTENSIONS will not work properly. What happens is that it takes so long for
Front Page on the Host Server to "update" once you have
"published" anything to it, that it times out. Timing out involves
settings at the server end, and are not under your (or at least my) control.
With PAIR.COM this is set at about 15 minutes; they tried setting it to somewhat
longer for me, and it was still not enough. On one site they have with a Front
Page Network and FP Extensions it takes 3 hours; that is a big customer and has
his own server, not shared, and they can indulge that size customer. They can't
indulge me (or perhaps they could but I declined to discuss it since that's a
favor much larger than any reader could ask for).
There are two possible remedies to this. First, Microsoft could cause Front Page
to send signals to the Server that it is busily thinking and should not be shut
down; progress signals sent to the home host on updating would probably do that
job, although I don't know that much about internal workings of servers; in any
event no progress signals of any kind are sent, so it's moot. This appears to be
the case with both FP 98 and FP 2000.
The other remedy is to chop your web into subwebs, and only publish the subweb
you have been working on. The other subwebs won't be changed, there will be no
need to list their pages, and no need to "update". I tested this with
FP 98 and a small subweb on the Pair.com site and it worked: about 4 minutes to
upload and update "sciences" which has about 4 pages. That's at a
44,000 connection (yes I know that's a figure of speech, and I haven't time to
discuss it). It does work, and when it works, the FP SEARCH function works for
that subweb.
The problem is that FP 98 makes it a LOT of work to chop your web into subwebs.
You can do it but you will not like doing it. I did it for a few chunks and said
zum Teufel mit ihm. Enter Peter Kent, who has FP 2000 working; presumably NOT on
an NT4 SP 4 machine! FP 2000 makes it extremely easy to chop a web into chunky
subwebs, and does it almost invisibly. You really can't tell that it has done
it, but it publishes only the subwebs you worked on; so that if you kept things
small enough, in my case say MAIL as a subweb and possibly two of them, ditto
with VIEW, Strategy of Technology as another subweb, and so forth, things would
go swiftly.
I tried this only to find that FP 2000 WILL NOT WORK with NT 4 Service Pack 4. I
don't have Service Pack 5: I am not sure why. I don't ever recall problems with
SP 4 before although I have heard of many; in any event, I believe I got SP 4 as
part of the Y2K upgrade to NT I put in some time ago and reported on in VIEW.
Worse, in my case at least, I cannot return from Front Page 2000 to Front Page
98, which I was willing to do given the hurry I am in just now; it wouldn't have
been a permanent solution to the problem but it would have got me through the
week, and I could have carried SP 4 installed on my portable and used it to do
some web updates while I was in New York for PC Expo. I won't be doing that
because I can't: when I uninstalled FP 2000 from my system (actually I
uninstalled Office 2000 including some parts I'd have as soon kept) and
uninstalled every trace of extensions and web server software, then reinstalled
FP 98, I was given a message (with no options) that FP 2000 extensions were
running and FP 98 extensions would not be installed, see my net administrator;
and when I tried to get FP 98 to open a web or create a web it would not,
complaining that it had no extensions running. This happened twice, with
installation of Office 2000, uninstallation of Office 2000, installation of FP
98, uninstallation thereof, and having to go to DOS to get rid of SQL7 which
began running and cannot be uninstalled because of sharing errors: eventually I
booted up in DOS 6.3 and used DOS to erase the MSSQL7 directory as the only way
out. Thank God I hadn't converted this machine to NTFS!
I then went to Symantec Visual Page, which is a direct editor, has some nice
features, will open pages and let me edit them, and which I am using now. It's
not a permanent solution for a number of reasons. It doesn't do links as easily
as Front Page and it isn't as convenient for fixing broken references and such.
It doesn't have the FP link checking, and there is a lot missing. It doesn't
integrate with Word and Outlook as well as FP did. It loses formatting
information when you paste into it. The 'select' mechanism sucks dead bunnies if
you have to scroll while selecting. I do not recommend Visual Page, and note too
that it won't handle files when they get long enough, which is why this week's
mail is broken into two pages.
It also won't handle page name changes propagation: when I change page names you
may be sure I will get a lot of broken links. So it goes.
A while ago I tried Dreamweaver. I abandoned it for Front Page for what I
thought at the time were good reasons. I have it (latest I think: 1.2), and I am
about to try it again. It may do the job nicely. What I purpose to do is install
Dreamweaver, and begin to build a new web site: with links at the top to this
one, but with the index page of this one given a different name. The internal
links of this one that refer to index.html will of course send you back to the
"new" index page, but that's all right: I'll design it so you know
which path to go down. This will, in other words, be a subweb, more or less, as
I experiment with different styles and pictures and such in a new web. I may go
to the "modern" style of a fixed width text screen. I may do away with
my parchment, and try other colors. I may copy other webs. We will see. I will,
in a word, beat on Dreamweaver which seems the candidate for the job.
But let me be clear: if Front Page actually worked, it would be very good. It
did link checks well, it did links well. It also produces messy code that other
programs have problems with, and the Extensions suck dead turtles through soda
straws. The necessity to chop into subwebs is probably a 'feature' of the link
checking and the ability to do global search and replace, and file name changes:
it really does a neat job of going through and finding every link to a file and
changing that when you change file names or move a file to a different
directory. That I think has the great cost of requiring the "updates"
that take forever, and is why sometimes it can take more than a minute to save a
page with many links in it.
I could live with all that if it worked properly, and I could even live with FP
98 and "publishing" by ftp (If the server you publish to does not have
the FP extensions running, then FP 98 uses "web post" which as near as
I can figure is an ftp connection). However, I have some aversion to fragility
and I get the impression that FP 98 is fragile. If FP 2000 had worked on this
machine I would be using it now.
What next? First, I will experiment with Dreamweaver, which is a good thing and
will give me something to write about. Second, I will be setting up a new NT
Workstation here anyway: Princess is a couple of years old, and a very good
machine: Compaq made a real winner with their dual Pentium professional
workstation and I can recommend it highly -- but Princess has 4 gigabytes of
storage and needs more, and being a table top has limited room for new assets
like a ZIP and a CD/RW drive. She'll probably be relegated to Larry Niven's work
station area here as a super reliable machine far more than good enough for
writing, merging novels (big merges of several megabye Word Documents with
changes all through them take a fair amount of CPU to do quickly) and other such
work.
My new system will use either NT 4 SP 5 or Windows 2000, and Office 2000; I'll
then test FP 2000 on a copy of the new web I have built with Dreamweaver.
"I do all these silly things so you won't have to…"
But that's for later. For now I am just trying to make do as I get ready to
catch an airplane. And that's a long answer to a letter, so I'll put it in VIEW
as well, if it doesn't blow up VIEW…
Let me add to that a bit here.
The big objection to Front Page (other than that I couldn't get it to work properly with extensions once this
site got large enough) is that once you are sucked into it, it is very hard to get out of. Not impossible. Note
that I am able to work on MOST of my FP Pages with Symantec's Visual Page. I am doing that now. I am even typing
on the stick here: this isn't being done in WORD but in Visual Page and it's fast enough: one objection I had to
Front Page was that typing directly in Front Page editor was horrible as you would press a key, and there would
be a delay before the letter got on screen. I can't stand this since I watch what I am typing. Two finger typists
probably wouldn't care.
Front Page 98 running on a server without the FP extensions works OK. It keeps your local copy of your site
in good shape, and one a fast machine like Princess (dual Pentium 200 so it's not the latest) the update process
is acceptable if slow. It keeps track of links, find broken links, and makes it very easy to change page names
(it changes the name everywhere you had a link to it) and to move files to new directories. It's a bit slow on
imports -- you can't just drag a new file or page in, it has to be imported, and the import is pretty slow -- but
again it's acceptable.
Front Page 2000 won't run without the extensions. I don't know if it will export to a web server without them,
but they have to be running on your host system where you are doing the editing. Those extensions won't work on
NT 4 SP 4, and what they do work on is not known to me yet although I will try FP 2000 on a Windows 2000 system,
Bob Thompson has found that FP 2000 doesn't publish reliably but that may be a version problem. In any event, while
Peter Kent has been impressed with FP 2000 (and his opinion is worth a lot), I haven't been able to get it running,
and I am now a bit gun-shy.
The other objection to FP is that it writes all kinds of goo into your code, and it does make it a bit hard
to do hand edits. On the gripping hand, I try hard not to do hand HTML edits. I don't like simulating a computer
in my head, and that's what editing HTML raw code is for me. I don't try to do layout design of my books, either.
I do draw maps, but I get a professional to do the finish map work. I'm a wordsmith, and when I do code I like
something like Pascal or Modula where the code is a lot more, well, modular, and readable. But that's for another
time.
Bottom line: if you go with Front Page you may be stuck with it, and when your web site hits a certain degree
of complexity it will start to fail you. There are work arounds, and I make no doubt that Microsoft will come up
with a new release with most of the bugs fixed. Clearly if you intend to use Office 2000 you ought to think about
Front Page 2000 since there will be plenty attempts at integration of Office and FrontPage.
AND NOW I AM OFF TO PC EXPO. I may or may not be able to do updates from there. My apologies to subscribers:
one of the consequences of my last 3 days of mucking about was that the subscriber list got shoved off in a corner
by the successive revisions of Outlook. I have it, intact, no problems, and you will get a mailing next weekend;
probably a special PCEXPO Show Report with some pictures and words and perhaps my "awards" for the show.
But not this week.
If I manage to revise things while in New York I will probably start a new VIEW page, and I'll make notes in
the right places. I am taking Visual Page and the ftp program so it may be possible to update some of this stuff
from there. We will see.
BYE FOR NOW.
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