A.1. 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 WYSIWIG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) editor (the FrontPage Editor), but full site management features for the client as well (the FrontPage Explorer). FrontPage 1.0 had only been on the market for a few months when the announcement came that Vermeer had been purchased by Microsoft, and that the FrontPage system was going to form the basis of Microsoft's web design strategy.
As advanced as it was, FrontPage was not immune to problems. In particular, the FrontPage editing client had a tendency to rewrite a page's code to meet its own specifications, which often resulted in nonfunctional scripts — a trait that most developers did not ...
