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FrontPage 2003 to Improve Standards Support? The pigs are flying, you say?

There are semi-encouraging signs that Microsoft might be addressing one of the biggest problems with its FrontPage software - that being the dire quality of the markup that it generates. In a CNet news article entitled Microsoft aims higher with Web software, Melisa Samuelson, a Microsoft product manager is quoted as saying:

“We’ve heard in the past that customers felt our code wasn’t transparent enough, that we generated messy code … We’ve really focused on generating clean, industry-standard HTML code.”

Given the number of governmental and public offices that use FrontPage as the default web authoring tool (on the basis that it’s ‘free’ when bundled with the MS Office suite), it’s especially important that the tool generates markup that complies with W3C standards (that Microsoft itself helped to define). Add to this the fact that US government agencies - many of whom will be using FrontPage - are required to make web pages comply with Section 508 accessibility guidelines, and you have even more reason to expect that the markup produced is clean and compliant.

Personally, I doubt that the quote from this MS employee will hold much water in the end. I fully expect FrontPage 2003 to create exactly the kind of markup that it always has done - proprietary, MS-oriented markup that breaks in all manner of wonderful ways in any browser other than Internet Explorer. We shall see …

Filed under: Accessibility
Posted by Ian on Wednesday, June 11, 2003

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