Beginning SharePoint® Designer 2010

Appendix A. A Brief History of SharePoint and SharePoint Designer

This book has thoroughly introduced you to Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010. Many readers will be satisfied understanding the present state of the product. Others, however, may find a history of this latest in a long line of web design tools from Microsoft useful. In particular, it may help in understanding those "What were they thinking?" moments. This appendix discusses the evolution of SharePoint Designer and Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies, and how they influenced each other.

FROM FRONTPAGE TO SHAREPOINT DESIGNER

The year was 1995. Although the Internet had been around for many years, only recently had its Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and the associated Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) caught the public eye in the form of the World Wide Web. While the general public was falling in love with the Web through web browsers such as Mosaic, Netscape, and Internet Explorer, many companies were struggling to come up with ways to produce the content this new market was demanding.

One such company was Vermeer Technologies. Vermeer came up with a unique, modular approach to web design that it called FrontPage. It included prebuilt functionality for the server — the FrontPage Server Extensions (FPSE) — and modules for the design client (which it called WebBots). Unlike most web design tools, FrontPage included not only a WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) editor (the FrontPage Editor), but full site ...