More
Frontpage 2000 warnings:
1. Warning about
crashes
I still use Frontpage
2000, having bought it because of improper and misleading reviews, and
having little money to invest in something better, like Macromedia's
DreamWeaver.
In any case, the reader
who uses FP 2K should keep in mind what I just found out again:
MicroSoft does not
believe in exception-handling, and does not put it into its code, it
seems to me:
Whereas good
programs at present all save your work in the background, and allow
you to go back to a recent version in case of crashes, FP 2K does no
such thing.
Hence it may happen to
you what just happened to me:
You are busy for an hour
on a text; suddenly - simply because it doesn't know how to handle all
keyboard input - it crashes, irrecoverably and immediately, and all
your work is gone (even if you have been saving it, for it is saved in
a temporary file MicroSoft will not recover for you). Back
To Top.
2. Warning about
links
You can not make hyperlinks on
consecutive lines, in FP 2K: Such links
will merge with the previously existing hyperlink on the next or
previous line (and FP 2K will not tell you it does so).
The only way to avoid
this bug I found is to put in two breaks before and after such links I
want to make (that happen as a matter of course in the plainest
html!); then make the link; and then remove the breaks I put in. (It
makes me feel like in the early CP/M-days, 15 years ago - except that
these days I get angry about such unnecessary enormous
ineptitude.) Back To Top.
3. Warning about
dll-s and reinstalling FP 2K
For months, FP 2K
immediately after being started up trundled for 5 to 10 minutes,
allowing me no access whatsoever to my computer, and then
irrecoverably crashed with the message "Insufficient memory
for division through zero" - which itself is a piece of utter
nonsense, although it is true absolutely everything in the processor
(registers, flags) indeed was zero after such crashes.
I reinstalled FP 2K in
all available ways, both partially and fully: No difference, and no
information, and no help (all as usual - and incidentally, I work on a
completely ordinary system).
Recently, I found out FP
2K suddenly deigned to start up properly again, I suppose because
finally and by some fluke I installed a dll it needs but that it has
not been programmed to tell it needs (although this would be very easy
to program). Back To Top.
4. Warnings about
html-editors
I have tried many and
found most wanting. The reason I found most wanting is that the
cheaper and simpler ones, and also some that are neither cheap nor
simple, lack proper site-maintenance.
Site-maintenance
is in fact a database compiled by the editing program that maintains
hyperlinks, so that one does not need to rewrite them by hand or
reintroduce them otherwise if one moves or renames a file (as will
happen often in practice).
If, like me, you maintain
a site with tens, hundreds or thousands of files, you absolutely need
a html-editor with proper site-maintenance, or else you'll end up
thoroughly insane. (This is not so if your site has a few files only.)
This is the only reason I
still use FP2K:
It does site-maintenance,
and other html-editors I have either don't do this at all, or don't do
this well.
And if you do want to use
hyperlinks in any extensive way, linking to more than a few
files, you'll find that you need site-maintenance, at least in the
sense that the links you made are preserved (rewritten by the program)
if you move or rename the files they link to.
Next, there are some
hardened nerdy types who will tell you that what you really need is a
plain html-editor in which you normally edit html rather than the text
it will produce.
This is nonsense of the
masochistic kind: In general, it should be possible to write a WYSIWYG
html-editor that also allows you to edit the html if required.
And to finish on a
positive remark: FP 2K does have this part of its editing
fairly well organized (as do many other WYSIWYG html-editors). Back
To Top.
5. What you can
rely on with MicroSoft software
What you can rely on with
MicroSoft software with perfect assurance and certainty is that it
will let you down in more undocumented ways than you think possible,
and that there will be no help, no information, and no redress from
MicroSoft.
What you can also rely on
with MicroSoft software is that it will be hardly debugged, will be
ill documented, in prose that is not English but a kind of Newspeak,
and will promise you all manner of things that are absolutely untrue.
And what you also can
rely on with MicroSoft software is that whereas really good
programmers work for other firms, MicroSoft specializes in
employing real top lawyers selling tenth-rate software with
many bugs and holes but no legal redress - for the one certain thing
you'll find is that its software will let you down and crash at the
most inconvenient moments, for no apparent reason at all, but
MicroSoft's top lawyers will have foreseen that and any other
eventuality, and sealed all possible forms of redress or repair
(rather than straightening out their bugged code, which indeed is less
easy and more expensive).
MicroSoft probably knows
less about good software and more about lawyers' tricks and traps than
any other computer firm in business.
Maarten Maartensz
July 12, 2000
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