
FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997) - soheilpro
http://www.telecommander.com/pics/links/application%20software/microsoft/Frontpg98/FrontPage%2098%20Elegant%20&%20Exquisite.htm
======
cntlzw
You can say what you want but these were great times! Everyone could make
their own little ugly homepage and it was exciting. People didn't really judge
each other or bragged about how this tech is better than that. I kinda miss
it.

~~~
degenerate
I made some groovy table-based sites by setting up the table layout with the
FrontPage GUI and then editing the raw HTML it generated. It taught me HTML
and opened the doors to web development for me. Same story using Visual Basic
and my segway into programming.

~~~
stantaylor
It was pretty amazing to me that you could do WYSIWYG (wow, that's an
anachronism itself!) valid HTML development, and then hand-manipulate the HTML
and it let you put any invalid shit in there without complaining.

~~~
Zardoz84
I remeber messing HTML stuff with HotDog

~~~
stevenicr
I remember hotdog! I preferred "netobjects fusion" more than any other similar
though.

Still have not found anything that makes design as easy, and visual, like
netobjects fusion.

------
pjc50
Oh god, the horror.

Not just the ugly webpages, those were the ubiquitous style at the time. No,
FrontPage pioneered deep ugliness, because like all Microsoft products of the
90s it regarded interoperability as a threat. It produces ugly HTML that works
best in IE, and it has an optional upload mechanism that requires IIS on the
server side.

[https://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/website/frontpage/th...](https://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/website/frontpage/the-
death-of-frontpage-extensions)

~~~
scarface74
I love how they laid it on the line. “If you want to do web development, you
need to actually learn web technology”

Now if someone would tell web developers that if you want to write
desktop/mobile apps, you need to learn native frameworks.....

 _What are newer FrontPage alternatives?

The Internet and the web have changed drastically since the days when
FrontPage was a very common website editor. Almost every modern website editor
these days will require you to have some basic understanding of the concepts
of HTML, and CSS coding, instead of the drag and drop design that FrontPage
used._

~~~
rustcharm
Don't forget the _first_ program in this space: Adobe Pagemill.

~~~
berkut
Wasn't HoTMetaL (Pro) the first actually released (in 1994)? Pagemill was in
beta until 1995...

~~~
scarface74
Claris Home Page looks like it also came out in 1994.

------
maaaats
Born in 91, I was the perfect age to be obsessed with Harry Potter. When I was
around ten, an older kid in the neighborhood helped me make a Harry Potter
themed website using FrontPage (the Express version I think it was named).

Small, random event that end up having a big effect on my life. My hobbies,
what&where I chose to study, the friends I got there etc. I can trace back to
this.

~~~
ddtaylor
Similar story for me, but with a Dragonball Z fan site. Internet, I'm sorry.

~~~
ddnb
Made a Pokemon fan site, must have been 9 or something, I didn't know how to
link to other pages, so everything was one page and links worked via
anchors...

~~~
robryan
I attempted to make a pokemon battle system in front page by linking pages and
hard coding each action.

~~~
blairbeckwith
Oh man, me too. I couldn’t figure out anything about dynamic web pages except
that I needed a host with “cgi-bin support”. I wanted to build a Neopets
alternative, and when I couldn’t figure out how to do anything dynamic, I
figured I could just build out a new page for every combination of variables
that could change.

I was like, 7, so my math skills didn’t really allow me to understand the
scope of the number of pages that would be required.

But god damn if I didn’t have a blast trying.

------
OskarS
You know, good design principles weren't invented in 2006. There was plenty of
good design in the 90s in other industries (publishing, newspapers, magazines,
advertising, academia, ...), but apparently fucking nothing of that filtered
down to webdesign.

I mean: yes, technology was limited. I get that you couldn't have free range
with things like typography and that CSS wasn't a thing yet. But for the love
of god: a textured red background that made the already shittily rendered text
_even harder to read_?! What were we thinking?

~~~
kristopolous
I'm so glad we've learned these days with 10,000KB of JS for 1KB of text
rendered in tiny, hairline thin fonts on no-contrast backgrounds.

It's honestly always been bad ... before the web you'd dial into terminal
based systems (BBS) and be assaulted with a perverse amount of ANSI escape
codes and 8-bit extended ASCII flying around the screen and blinking at you
(interfaces like this:
[https://s0.mundogamers.com/uploaded/bbsmenu.jpg](https://s0.mundogamers.com/uploaded/bbsmenu.jpg)).
In between the two eras even IRC and UseNet got full of crufty ASCII art
followed by leet-speak spelled weirdly cased words...it was illegible,
unappealing and awful.

Having the maturity to know when to stop and having the control to know what
not to do have always been talents far more rare than we'd prefer.

~~~
Fjolsvith
Frankly, that was not an artistic example of the BBS scene. Here is one that
had aesthetically pleasing features:

[https://cleaner.ansilove.org/bbs.html](https://cleaner.ansilove.org/bbs.html)

And, if you want to see a live version of a sweet looking BBS, check out this
one in your telnet app:

telnet: absinthe.darktech.org:23

~~~
kristopolous
Well sure, you can always cherry-pick good examples of anything.

------
gattilorenz
The whole domain is amazing.

Just look at this page, updated LAST YEAR:
[http://www.telecommanderhosting.com/ec/framed_Microsoft_OS.h...](http://www.telecommanderhosting.com/ec/framed_Microsoft_OS.html)
Look at the waving Win 95 logo! Not to mention the "office clipart guy" in the
homepage...

I am just suprised that the obligatory "under construction" gif is missing!

~~~
ObsoleteNerd
Don't worry, Ling's Cars will make sure you get your full fix of Geocities
design.

[https://www.lingscars.com/](https://www.lingscars.com/)

~~~
dfox
What is slightly weird is that the website actually uses HTML5, minified CSS
and what not.

------
brightball
People laugh, but this is how I learned HTML back then.

I did something in Frontpage and then checked the code it generated to see how
to do it with the tags.I still remember the Dreamweaver vs Frontpage vs
Notepad arguments.

I'm getting old.

~~~
franze
Me, too. Use FrontPage (later DreamWeaver), check code. Delete bit by bit what
wasn't needed. Unserstand what the rest was doing. Iterrate on it.

For those who laugh: we didn't have any proper html dev dokus at that point.
search engine still sucked. we learned html by
copy&pasting&deleting&iterrating.

------
jkabrg
I'm wondering how many of the complaints here are to do with FrontPage itself,
or the very idea of WYSIWYG web design.

To me, it seems that web design is a visual thing. And if so, then a WYSIWYG
editor is the appropriate thing to use. I'm suspicious that some people here
don't think visually, and don't see the value in thinking visually.

I don't know what people mean when they say "bad markup". I imagine it might
include things like positioning elements using absolute coordinates. But I'm
sure this is solvable by previewing the webpage on different resolutions,
browsers and device types.

~~~
c-smile
browsers do the following:

By given set of HTML and CSS produce bitmap on screen. That's perfectly
determined task (modulo browser differences).

WYSIWYG editor does the opposite task:

With the given bitmap on screen produce set of valid HTML and CSS
declarations.

The last task is undetermined mathematically speaking - with modern HTML and
especially CSS there are too many ways of get the same rendering using
completely different CSS tricks - absolute positioning, floats, display:grid
and flexbox etc. etc.

------
petercooper
One related tool that's often forgotten, I find, is Microsoft _Publisher_.
Publisher 97 had an option to build and export an entire site 100% visually. I
had family members use it to build their complete personal sites.

It was a pretty clever system, too. It built layouts automatically using
complex tables, split out text where it could, used image maps where it had
to, etc. It wasn't something you'd be proud of using but it was the fastest
tool for non-technical users at the time and would probably even hold up
pretty well now(!)

~~~
mercer
Oh man, I remember 'upgrading' to Publisher from FrontPage. I do agree that it
was surprisingly clever at what it did, but I'm also happy I eventually
learned how to write my own html/css eventually!

------
nicolaslem
> Microsoft FrontPage 98 also now provides support for the Channel Definition
> Format (CDF) which is a really keen way of broadcasting your web content to
> an end user's Windows desktop. You can "push" content to your visitors
> without having them seek you out daily for updates.

It looks like this used to be the precursor of RSS.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Definition_Format](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Definition_Format)

~~~
carlob
And desktop notifications

------
swerner
Back then, we thought those were bloated web pages. Litte did we know.

------
netgusto
[https://boles.com/](https://boles.com/) (website the article uses in
examples) is now front'd by Bootstrap.

Is Bootstrap is the new Frontpage?

------
tjoff
Man, look at that site. Unimaginably fast, works perfect on mobile, no clutter
and readable.

It truly has gone downhill since then.

~~~
Kerrick
> Unimaginably fast

From the article:

> I also like the load time estimation found in the bottom right corner --
> that's a constant reminder how long it will take the page you're working on
> to load for your visitors. My resume page is pretty good on wait time -- 14
> seconds and that includes a graphic in addition to a massive HTML file!

His "unimaginably fast" website took 14 seconds to load. Compare that to
today's "bloated" sites like CNN's home page. Loads in 4.3 seconds, and
finishes asynchronously loading all the bloat in 7.8 seconds.

~~~
tjoff
That was probably with a 28.8k modem under less than ideal circumstances. He
probably could optimize it further though, sure, is that your point?

Yes, technology at the time did limit the kind of bloat that would be
tolerated. Is that an excuse to go all in now just because we can?

------
watersb
"Exquisite Channeling"

Wow. I worked at Netscape summer of 1997, a team that helped content providers
get their web sites ready to showcase the Dynamic HTML and Channel features in
Netscape 4.0.

Javascript and RDF. In 1997.

------
subir
FrontPage 97 was the first WYSIWYG tool I ever used, since graduating from the
humble text editors. IIRC, I got a free upgrade to FrontPage98. Coupled with
Visual InterDev, it formed the core of my webdev workflow.

At the time Macromedia was making terrific advances in this space. Ca.
1999-2000 I moved to Dreamweaver, Ultradev, Flash and Paint Shop Pro(liked it
better than Fireworks; story for another day).

~~~
anentropic
isn't that back to front?

you were supposed to graduate from WYSIWYG tools like FrontPage, which
generated utterly awful markup, to writing proper HTML yourself in a text
editor

~~~
cannonedhamster
Actually I did this as well. I learned to code in HTML and was forced to use
Dreamweaver in school because it was "faster". I could use a template and code
most of what I needed to by hand faster than most other students could with
the tool. I also made very clean, super fast loading sites because I tried to
do everything as simple as possible. On of my final projects fell through
despite me building them an entire, completely custom, hand written website
that was accessible, clean, and loaded super fast. I've never thought I've had
a keen eye for designing new things but I've definitely got an eye for the
classics and got a lot of accolades in my class for that work.

------
kumarvvr
"WebMaster". I see this term a lot in older sites. "WebMasters click here !"
sort of links.

What does it really mean? The term.

~~~
disiplus
there was also this thing between webmasters, called banner exchange. that's
how you got new traffic to your website. i remember when i did my first gaming
review site up in high school i was trying to get my banner to as many other
sites as i could and they would get the place on my site. i remember tweaking
my banner in macromedia flash :)

~~~
reitanqild
I wish we could go bac to this again.

Link to the pages you find interesting. Forget SEO. Find more pages by
following recommendations. Allow ourselves to create "ugly" pages.

------
thedaemon
Although it's just a footnote on this page, Microsoft GIF Animator is still
the easiest and most useful GIF animation tool out there. I have yet to find
anything quite as easy to make animated GIFs. I haven't used it in years
though, not sure if it's still floating around and if it runs on a modern OS.

~~~
trading_wheels
I loved and used Image Composer for years after I'd moved on from Frontpage; I
remember havng to install FP solely to get a copy of it (and some of the other
tools like GIF animator)

------
donatj
I used Netscape’s Composer for a while, then Frontpage. It was the sheer
frustration of trying to get it to do what I want that lead me into actually
learning and mastering HTML.

I was told by a number of “experts” at the time that I was silly and WYSIWYGs
were the way forward. It’s some 20 years later and thus far they’ve still
never really worked very well. Also, man that makes me feel old.

~~~
mgkimsal
in 1997, i had people tell me i would never be a real webmaster if I wasn't
using hotdogpro. i never wanted to be a real webmaster, so I guess I dodged a
bullet there.

------
wiradikusuma
Isn't it funny that the _tone_ for an article written more than 20 years ago
can change over time? Honestly, I don't know if the article was written in
sarcasm or not.

------
steerpike
Hmm. I'm pretty certain Homesite was out by then which I always felt was the
best web IDE. Such a shame what happened to it.

~~~
dagw
Homesite was amazing. I think it was the first 'professional' piece of
software I actually spent my own money on.

------
aavotins
Wow, this was a trip down memory lane. In fact it was Frontpage 98 that
inspired me to try out my hand at building the web, back in 1999. I was just
10 years old back then. However it sparked my interest, because I could create
something. Creating a webpage about my then most favorite game Commandos:
Behind Enemy Lines, publishing it and receiving my first ever e-mail from
someone in the UK about a spelling error resulted in an experience that struck
me so deeply that I became a web developer. Almost 20 years later I still love
what Microsoft FrontPage 98 allowed me to discover.

------
flukus
My first programming job often consisted of us adding buttons and a javascript
snippet to third party websites as part of the on boarding process (thinking
embedding a webring script). Usually this was easy, but sometimes you'd get a
FrontPage site and this simple edition would completely blow up the site.

Fortunately I usually didn't have to use front page to do it and could hand
edit the HTML, if it blew up when they tried to edit it in front page again we
could blame that on MS, which was believable with their software quality at
the time.

------
sdrothrock
I love this! This is a much better example of what things were like in the
early days of the internet than a lot of what I saw on the Web Design Museum
([https://webdesignmuseum.org](https://webdesignmuseum.org),
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17891826](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17891826))
-- I'd completely forgotten about the tendency to use garish round images for
buttons and weird fonts.

------
chippy
Frontpage came with the all the usual Office software in the bundle which
meant that it was often found on most internet cafes PCs. I spent a year
backpacking in 2000 and used Frontpage in those cafes to edit and update my
travel website. I kept most of it on a floppy disk, and also used FTP. The
internet cafes often had scanners too, so I was able to scan a selection of
developed print photos to include in the site there.

------
vital101
Back when I was in middle school I used a copy FrontPage 98 at school to
generate frames for my Star Wars site and then finished up the rest at home
with FrontPage Express. A few years ago I restored the site after finding a
broken version of it on the WayBack machine.

[http://re-cycledair.com/starwars/Entrance.html](http://re-
cycledair.com/starwars/Entrance.html)

~~~
alexharrisnyc
> Approx. download time: 2 hours and 9 min. at 28.8 kbps

------
AriaMinaei
I was obsessed with this software as a kid. I could never get it to run on my
computer though.

My PC had a faulty RAM which would get hit somewhere in the middle of
installation and trigger the blue screen of death. I tried that install
program a hundred times. Tried different distributions, tried changing the OS
(98 to ME and back). Nothing worked.

And we couldn't afford getting me a new RAM. Mom and Dad were still repaying
the loan that they took three years ago to buy me that broken computer. No way
they could add a brand new RAM to their expenses.

But I really wanted to build my own website. I would watch video tutorials of
FrontPage (on pirated CDs), and I'd imagine using all the techniques from the
videos to design my own website. You could make links (for some reason, links
seemed cool), and dynamic links that didn't reload the page (which meant
iframes everywhere). You could add clip arts (those tacky office cliparts),
and buttons that react to the mouse (I could imagine building whole games out
of those).

The possibilities would be _endless_... if only I could get the money to buy
that new RAM.

After attempting and failing a few ideas to raise the money, I decided that
the only way I could get that kind of money would be to... write a book!

The book would be a guide to a software called "Multimedia Builder." MMB was a
tool to make Autorun programs. You could make a window with buttons, videos,
music, interactivity. It even had a scripting language. It was very popular at
the time and my classmates were asking me to show them how to use it. I
decided I'd write a book about it (there were none on the market), sell the
book to a publisher, and use the money to buy not just a new RAM, but a whole
new computer!

I drafted the layout (somehow layout was more important than content for me).
Outlined the chapters. Built folders of step-by-step screenshots...

... until Mom surprised me with $36 that she had gotten as extra salary! One
of the best days of my life! Off I ran to the computer market. Bought a brand
new SDR Ram, put it on my underpowered PC400 motherboard, started the
computer, put the FrontPage CD in, and fired up install. I remember watching
the install progress bar slowly fill. It was always near the halfway mark that
the blue screen would appear. I remember the angst I felt as the progress bar
approached the halfway mark, passed it, and the screen remained very not blue!

I outgrew FrontPage in two weeks. Turns out, FrontPage can't really do much :)

What I should have learned was actually HTML, CSS, and PHP. Which I did, right
after. Funny things is though, they would've all ran fine on my faulty RAM! I
could've started my web dev adventure a whole year earlier! Good times.

~~~
maaaats
Thanks for sharing, cool to read.

------
logicallee
I read quite a bit of this but couldn't figure it out: is this writer sort of
mocking their own purple prose in a sort of self-consciously over-the-top way?
Or is that just their writing style? (It's hard to imagine anyone reading this
style seriously. Even the subtitle, "elegant and exquisite" is a weird way to
talk about software.)

Do you think they're making fun of something?

~~~
TotempaaltJ
It took me until he started showing the themes to realize it was a joke, but
after that it becomes a bit more evident.

~~~
karmickoala
> My resume page is pretty good on wait time -- 14 seconds and that includes a
> graphic in addition to a massive HTML file!

Ah, those were the times...

------
Adutude
Elegant and Exquisite, Hoo Hoo, Hee Hee, Gufaw!! I was running an ISP at that
time. This caused me no end of headaches in getting the FrontPage extensions
working on various and sundry web servers. It allowed people to easily create
websites, but caused a nightmare of support and infrastructure issues just to
keep it working. So glad this piece of tech faded into infamy.

------
cybervegan
There were sooo many crap webpages created with that software. I used it
myself for a while, before I knew better. It produced horrendous, buggy HTML.
Table handling was pants - I used to have to hand code tables (used for
layout!) to make them work properly. At least we don't have to do that these
days... oh, wait, sorry. Ok, we do.

------
joshstrange
Frontpage was terrible for the web in many ways but damn it if I didn't love
it to death when I first figured out how to use it and made my first websites
with it. It was my first "code" editor in a long line (Frontpage -> Notepad++
-> Coda -> Sublime Text -> Sublime Text 2 -> PHPStorm -> IDEA Ultimate)

------
orionblastar
I remember Frontpage 98 along with Outlook 98 they were offered as free
upgrades from older versions. I had Frontpage 97 and Outlook 97.

For programming, I used Visual Interdev which resembled Microsoft Visual Code
more than Frontpage. Visual Interdev was part of the Visual Studio package.

~~~
subir
> Visual InterDev

Haven't come across that word for over ~15 years =)

------
clon
I skimmed this entire article thinking it is a clever tongue-in-cheek piece,
and found it hilarious, only to realise that it was from 1997 and written
sincerely.

Wow, I wish I could get back those hours drawing complex tables and placing
1x1 pixel images in strategic places.

------
lwerdna
I pirated frontpage around 97,98 and used it to make garish homepages with all
the elements we consider sins today: frames, lens flare, flame gifs, and
background music. This was a formative experience that contributed to my
career and life today.

~~~
fluxsauce
Playing around with a tool is still using it. Who cares if it's ridiculous?
Getting anyone to be engaged with something new is way easier if they're
passionate about it. If a kid wants to edit a video about farts, they're going
to learn what it takes to make that fart video, and I applaud them.

Also, the marquee tag is mission critical.

------
Anonymous4C54D6
I miss this. Web pages were just data not programs.

~~~
olalonde
Why?

~~~
Aardwolf
Because you could just read the text and view the images without being
disturbed by 3 floating elements you have to close first, then when you
scrolled 25% down some new thing popping up in your way, then when you
scrolled 50% down some other annoying thing happening, and when at the end of
the article suddenly it changes into another one, all while some video starts
autoplaying but not without first having a wait during which you cannot pause
it, and without following you around in a tiny window at the bottom that
automatically appears again when you scroll, even if you tried to pause it.
All while some small floating elements on the sides somehow appear on top of
small parts of the text you are trying to read left or right.

~~~
rayiner
Yes! And also, because you weren't running a little program to display each
page, the back button actually worked. (Compare what HN does when you follow a
link then hit back to what Reddit does.)

------
p4bl0
Are there good free (as is free software) WYSIWYG website editors nowadays?

~~~
dagw
Hell are there good WYSIWYG website editors nowadays at any price?

~~~
giancarlostoro
Dunno depends on what you like, I liked Microsoft Expression Web and that
seemed to be free but they discontinued it. I would love to see VS Code become
a reasonable WYSIWYG editor for Markdown and HTML5 / CSS though. I have seen
some Electron based editors for Bootstrap that are very good, trick is to do
an HTML WYSIWYG editor you really do need a damn browser component to do it
properly enough. I would also like to see Mozilla create something similar for
Firefox Developer Edition, not just more JS editors.

------
js2
In the mid 90s while getting my CS degree, I had a side job as an SA at a
small ISP. We also provided site hosting. One of our clients designed his site
with FrontPage. This story reminded me of that, so out of curiosity I checked
to see if the site was still around. Not only is it still around, it still
looks like something straight out of the 90s. Behold:

[http://lotteryamerica.com/](http://lotteryamerica.com/)

------
SmellyGeekBoy
I remember FrontPage Express being pretty good too. Basically a souped-up web
developers' Notepad.

It had nowhere near the feature set of full-blown FrontPage, of course.

------
bootsz
So much nostalgia... Was just thinking it would be neat to try to make a "Web
Classic" version of the web without javascript and which only supports HTML
2.0 or 3.0. Maybe even bring back the 'blink' and 'marquee' tags :) . Kind of
goes completely against the "one web" principle though, so definitely not
practical. Fun to imagine having that kind of blank slate though.

------
bitwize
Good old GruntPage. Yet another technology I let pass by me as it grew to
dominance and then faded--I much preferred to work in Emacs, hand-crufting
HTML directly, and I never felt unproductive, especially when I used Scheme
scripts (outside Emacs) to generate lots of similar pages.

Given the tangle of unreadable, unmaintainable IE-specific garbage that
FrontPage produced, I'd say I came out on top overall.

------
th0ma5
I think WebDAV was of course the best thing about FrontPage and I still use it
whenever I can. FP made web development accessible to more people which is
fine, but I don't miss all the cruft it added, although, arguably we're in a
crazier mess now perhaps :P

------
marsrover
I never had the privilege of using Frontpage. I had the program and some books
but I felt like good ole notepad was good enough for me, so I never even tried
it out.

My mind was blown when I realized I could have different colors on my syntax
and people actually indented things.

------
oxplot
I don't get it. Maybe someone can explain why these style and many other at
the time were so hedious given that in print for a century preceding it, we
had beautiful color, font and layout.

~~~
pavlov
It wasn’t obvious at the time that web design should have anything to do with
print. Its immediate predecessors were a bunch of online systems like BBSes,
Compuserve, Prodigy that either ran inside a terminal emulator with garish
ANSI colors at best, or shipped with their own custom GUI app for access.

There was a lot of activity in the late ‘90s around what “authentic to the
medium” web design could look like, but I don’t remember people being very
interested in emulating traditional print design — which itself was in turmoil
thanks to digital publishing systems. Open a 1996 issue of Wired and you’ll
probably think the designers were on crack: purple text on garish background
images, cut-up barely readable fonts, that kind of thing.

------
code4tee
I remember the excitement of hunting for animated GIFs for your homepage and
putting up the ubiquitous “under construction” image on the pages you were
still working on.

------
comesee
When the client side ruled, and hosting was democratized. Anyone truly could
have had their own websitr. Now everyone uses facebook, Twitter or
squarespace.

------
acconrad
I remember ogling over the this and Dreamweaver and begging my parents to let
me have a copy. It seemed like it could do _everything_ at the time!

------
hawkilt
Nostalgia

~~~
nocman
It ain't what it used to be!

:-D

------
nacho2sweet
<p>Loved&nbsp;reading&nbsp;code&nbsp;like&nbsp;this&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>

------
cube00
Fond memories of looking for that free web hosting with Microsoft FrontPage
Extensions enabled to make my forms work.

------
zer0faith
When stuff like this comes up I cannot help but think of websites hosted on
geocities and angelfire. Oh the memories.

------
apazgo
Was there some kind of html mode for Word? I have a faint memory of actually
using word instead of frontpage

~~~
Bluecobra
Yes, I remember making "websites" in high school with this feature for a
class. I think it came out in Word 2000.

------
TheOrange
Hey. Don’t knock it. I had to use that

------
jeffmcmahan
"Here's an Automotive theme that is quite unique and pleasing to the eye: ...
<BARF>"

------
mbritton72
Frontpage, the tool of choice for boss's sons and nephews to help save money
on a website design.

------
pwned1
I remember the pure excitement of _tiled background images_. Those were the
days.

------
outside1234
Were we really that color blind back then or did we really have that poor
taste?

~~~
shakna
A bit of both.

The color palette was limited. 216 web-safe colors, 256 if you didn't mind the
user's open programs changing how it looked.

Colors displayed differently on different monitors, and 'dead' areas of the
screen, where colors would be less vibrant, were common.

And finally... The web was different, so we tossed all the rules. If you liked
it, that's good enough! Why pander to anybody else? This was your own thing.

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teilo
I know a guy in his 70s that still uses it.

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MiscIdeaMaker99
I don't miss any of that. I remember having to maintain "FrontPage Extension"
on IIS systems back in those days, and it was rough.

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patrickg_zill
FrontPage was based on the Vermeer acquisition by Microsoft.

The book by the founder, "High Stakes, No Prisoners" should be required
reading for anyone interested in doing an internet startup IMHO.

