[13078] in Public-Access_Computer_Systems_Forum
Re: Order of Information
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dan Lester)
Mon Aug 16 20:04:06 1999
Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 14:11:36 -0600
From: Dan Lester <dan@84.com>
In-Reply-To: <37B42088.C353000D@lehigh.edu>
To: PACS-L@LISTSERV.UH.EDU
Reply-To: Public-Access Computer Systems Forum <PACS-L@LISTSERV.UH.EDU>
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----------------------------Original message----------------------------
At 02:31 PM 8/13/99 -0600, Jennifer Heise wrote:
>Er.. the reports I got about FrontPage 2000 and the other HTML options
>in the Office 2000 suite were that pages creating on them were lovely in
>IE 5+ but tended to blow up in anything else.
Well, here are some sites for you to check that were made with FP2000:
http://library.boisestate.edu
http://www.84.com
http://www.postcard.org
http://libser.boisestate.edu
http://lester.boisestate.edu
http://libnet.boisestate.edu
http://www.lili.org
http://www.idaholibraries.org
I've never seen any of them crash other browsers. Over half of my
colleagues use NS4.08 or NS4.5 or NS4.6 and have never reported any
problems with any of the sites above (including the boisestate.edu ones
that they use daily.) If you view the libnet site in NS you'll see the
animated gifs, but you won't see the transitions. The same is true of the
libser site. In both of those cases the transitions and such aren't there
because they're functional, but because the staff who manage those webs are
trying out things to see what works, how it works, etc. Naturally, I
encourage "playing with the toys", as that is the best way to learn. Both
of those sites are only really used by library staff, and I wouldn't plan
to use such cute things on a mainstream public site for the library.
>Can anyone confirm or
>deny, since we have a campus Office 2000 license but our systems guys
>cannot get the Frontpage extensions to work securely on our server
>setup?
Well, the FrontPage2000 extensions work fine on the O'Reilly WebSite 2.3.15
servers which power most of the sites above. A couple of those sites run
on my ISP's U**x servers, and am not sure which software they have behind
them. Also, the extensions work fine on www.boisestate.edu, which uses MS
IIS for server software. The server extensions are available from MS
website for a multitude of platforms, though probably not all possible ones.
People quickly learn that they don't really want to use all the "cute"
things for library sites, just as those of us who've been around a while
learned that <blink> wasn't so wonderful after all. o-) FP98 was pretty
evil about changing code written in other editors, but haven't had that
problem in FP2K. And, the code is always available in FP2K if you wish to
edit it (Which I've done on multiple occasions) The code is not as clean
and beautiful as that written by hand, but I'm more interested in having
productivity than beauty of code.
I'll also note that I also handle some webs that are on servers that do NOT
use FP2000 extensions. That means you don't get some of the fancy blinky
flashy stuff, but that isn't necessarily bad either. The biggest advantage
to running the FP2K extensions, IMHO, is making it very simple for folks to
work directly on the server for their web work and not have to mess with
"publishing" or ftping content to the server, although FP2K also handles
that smoothly with extensions or without.
I'm not saying that FP2K is the greatest thing since frozen pizza, but that
it is certainly a viable tool that should be carefully considered. We
don't have a campus license for it, so we've bought 20 copies at 39 bucks
each for library staff who handle web publishing.
And, no, I don't want to get into a debate on platforms, pro and con of
MS-anything, freeware, and so forth. If some of you are happy editing your
web pages in vi, more power to you (been there, done that, glad I don't
have to do it any more). (My personal web page creation is done about
half in FP2K and about half in HomeSite4.)
cheers
dan
--
Good, Fast, and Cheap: Which two of the three would you like?
Dan Lester, 3577 East Pecan, Boise, ID 83716 USA 208-383-0165
dan@84.com http://www.84.com/ http://www.postcard.org/
