I was listening to episode 47 of StackOverflow and Joel & Jeff celebrated the demise of Microsoft FrontPage. While I'm sure many others feel the same way - I do want to provide to the future Web historians - why FrontPage was important. And then where it went wrong.
I first encountered FrontPage in November 1996 when I became the first official "Webmaster" for the University of North Texas. My job was to not only manage the UNT central web servers and home page (until campus marketing woke up to the Web) but also help get other departments content up on the Web. And my team consisted of me plus 1 half-time person. We were housed in a room slightly smaller than a broom closet.
This was well before blogs and where Notepad was the de-facto standard for developing Web pages. And since we were running the central Web server on Sun boxes so to get content published - required FTP.
Or in other words - there were severe roadblocks to getting content up on the UNT web.
When I started a new upstart OS - Linux had just come into existence. And one Linux flavor - Caldera had support for Novell (the primary campus PC network) shares. So we cobbled together a PC, with an old network card (it only supported coax-cable "thinnet" not cat5 , so we had a converter) and Caldera. It worked (I knew Linux was going to be success when I went years without needing to touch the core OS, except the Novell shares kept dropping) and solved my FTP problem (learning FTP was beyond most people) but didn't address the hand-editing HTML problem.
When I first started - I was really hoping AOLPress - which was to my knowledge the first true WYSWIG HTML editor, would stick around. Unfortunately it was killed off in early 97. Thus I turned my attention to FrontPage.
FrontPage was not an original Microsoft product - it was an acquisition. Thus it actually initially worked better with UNIX systems. And it was exactly the tool I needed to get UNT Web off the ground.
It provided a simple, WYSWIG interface analogous to a word-processor.
It allowed you to create simple forms without needing to do any programming (a major sticking point for us since we didn't have a box we could dedicate to CGI scripting run amok).
And to publish you did "File->Save".
I cannot underestimate the success this was for us. I was able to grow the UNT web rapidly - I think at some point we were doing like 10 new sites a week or something similar. It also helped us pick our choice in our online course software (WebCT) because it was basically just Apache+Perl. Thus I could hack it to make it work with FrontPage (which was my initial claim to fame in that community. As in at the first WebCT conference, my presentation on FrontPage integration was attended by as many people as the keynote).
Of course FrontPage got sucked into the "we'll pretend the entire Web can run entirely on Microsoft only" insanity. And of course FrontPage couldn't really decide (IMHO) what it wanted to be. It wasn't tailored for the hardcore designed geeks like Macromedia Dreamweaver and then Web 2.0 cut out the bottom. Web 2.0 (blogs, MySpace/Facebook,Flickr, etc) made it simpler to create content without alot of special tools.
Thus the need for FrontPage was diminished though not completely forgotten. I mean I'm using Microsoft Live Writer to write this blog. Which in the end is much nicer and faster than cranking out tags.
So while in the end FrontPage had lots of warts - it's importance to the early Web shouldn't be completely forgotten.
