My Merchant Account Blog

Microsoft Expression Web Designer

Sunday, October 08, 2006

Since Corey Bryant was nominated for Microsoft Most Valueable Professional for Frontpage, I decided to take on the newest edition to the family - Microsoft Expression Web Designer (EWD).

Having a recent hard drive crash, I had to reinstall my operating system and program files. I took this opportunity to install Microsoft Expression Web Designer since the words BETA and Microsoft can bring chills to the computer user.

After installing, I opened a website with the Expression Web Designer. And then I went to a new page. It automatically put the DOCTYPE in there and it chose Transitional XHTML. Can Microsoft be changing the ways it views code?

I then went to Tools - Page Editor Options to see what goodies that had installed there. They had an Authoring tab which allowed you to choose different DOCTYPEs. Once again, very nice. Now I wonder if I chose HTML Transitional - would it know not to close the META tag Content-Type? I opened a new page and sure enough, the tag was not closed as in XHTML.

It stills adds that   in the empty cells but instead of using the attribute width for the table tag, it actually used styles. So let’s try the style sheets – what might happen here? I created a new style sheet, typed in bo and I saw body. And then for the attribute, I typed in wid and saw width and hit the tab key to complete. So far, it seems that Microsoft might have a pretty good winner here.