Expression® Web Design

Microsoft Internet Explorer 8

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

This morning when I turned on my monitor, I see that updates are pending from Microsoft.  I click on the icon to see needs to be updated.  I see that over 400MB will be downloaded, so I assume that it is not one of those Windows Definitions update.  I look to see what needs to be installed and I see Office 2007 Service Pack One is recommended, as well as Internet Explorer 8.

I first did a complete back-up with Acronis.  Then I take my chances first with the Service Pack.  I close Outlook 2007 but continue with a couple of things in a browser.  After the download and installation, my computer tells me it wants to reboot to complete the installation.  This is always a tense moment - wandering if I choose reboot if my computer will actually reboot properly.  After a couple of minutes, it actually rebooted with no problems.  Outlook took a few minutes to start back up, it was telling me it was preparing to start for the first time.

After I cleared a few of the role playing games on Facebook, I decided that I would take a chance to install Internet Explorer 8.  I did a another backup with Acronis.  I figured that since the computer was working OK with the Service Pack, I would revert back to the previous version.  I shut down Internet Explorer, Opera, Firefox, and Outlook and then decided to click on the button to install Internet Explorer 8.

Now, I had been using Internet Explorer 8 for quite some time on my other computer system with no problems.  I was hoping I would have the same experience.  And that tense moment again - the computer needs to reboot to complete the installation.

I watched as the screen went black and then started back up.  After about a minute, I was getting a little nervous.  It was probably another minute before the Windows screen was seen.  Of course, it felt much longer.

And I am happy to report that everything seems to be going well.  I was able to bring up some of the websites that I frequent and I did not need to enter my username or password.  There were some things that had changed since the beta install, but I did notice that Yahoo!® was listed in one of the features (sorry I did not notate where).

I will say the text on the Internet seems a bit crisper and clearer.  A couple of the websites seem to be faster as well.  One issue I did notice was when replying to a message on the HTML Code Tutorial was the textarea input box seemed to have problems scrolling when I was entering text that required the form field to scroll.  Hopefully that will be fixed in the next update.

Losing FrontPage Server Extensions

Sunday, April 12, 2009

Maybe you received an email from your hosting company stating that FrontPage Server Extensions are no longer being supported.  Hopefully they will give you a thirty day notice - but some web hosting companies are seeing that "supporting" FrontPage Server Extensions is not as profitable.  Unfortunately, Microsoft® dropped FrontPage Server Extensions like a hot potato when it discovered webmasters were looking to develop a website that was valid by the W3 standards (well it did take them a few years).

So now what does a webmaster do?  Maybe you have relied on FrontPage Server Extensions to process a simple contact form on your website - this was one of the better (and worse) things about relying on FrontPage Server Extensions.  Worse - because your email address was displayed in plain text when you looked at the source code.  Better because it was real easy for small businesses to set up a website and have their users contact them.  If you have stopped relying on FrontPage Server Extensions, you just need to make sure you are not using any other webbots that require FrontPage Server Extensions.  The second, if not first, webbot that most webmasters used was the publishing feature.  This is basically where you used http:// instead of the FTP process that is most supported by web hosting providers.  Even still today, Expression Web is lacking on its FTP client.  You will see Expression Web time out on you when you have made only one change to your website and attempt to rely on Expression Web as an FTP client. 

If you are now using FTP to upload / synchronize your website, either with FrontPage or Expression Web, chances are very good you do not need to worry about losing FrontPage Server Extensions.  However, if you are still using http as a way to manage your website, you need to look at using FTP before you inform your web hosting provider to turn off FrontPage Server Extensions.  You can check out downloading a website with Expression Web and FTP as a guide.

Deprecated HTML Tags

Friday, April 03, 2009

Hypertext Markup Language, better known as HTML, has come a long way since the 1980's.  Back then, HTML was basically the only way to help control background / colors / font information / layout, etc.  Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) came into play as webmasters needed a better way to style / layout their websites.  Web sites grew from a few pages to hundreds, if not thousands, of web pages.  Changing the font color of a header element became a tedious task.  However, with CSS, webmasters could change the information on one page, and that change would immediately show up on all pages that were attached to that style sheet.

Over the years, CSS has replaced a lot of HTML elements.  Some of the deprecated HTML elements are:

• <applet>
• <basefont>
• <center>
• <dir>
• <font>
• <s>
• <strike>
• <u>

Probably one of the biggest change that affected webmasters was the <font> element being deprecated.  (Keep in mind that even though the <font> element is deprecated, browsers still support its use though.)

FrontPage was notorious for abusing the <font> element.  Any change that you made to the text through FrontPage would result the <font> being placed in the HTML source code.  Every new paragraph would have these <font> elements in there, creating a nightmare for webmasters when the font family or size needed to be replaced.  An example would be something like:

<p><font color="#800000" size="4" face="Arial">Lorem ipsum</font></p>

As you can see, FrontPage (even its latest 2003 version), never had the size correct.  Of course, webmasters could do a find and replace in the HTML source code, but every so often, FrontPage might switch the attributes around and some code might be skipped.

By using a style sheet though, you can style all the text that is contained in the <p> element very simply by adding:

p
{
font: 1em arial #000
}