Why Microsoft Expression Web redefines irony
Expression is Microsoft’s suite of web development tools slated to replace the wonderful application known as Front Page. A quick visit to the site for this tool yields a fairly typical Microsoft webpage.
The “web” edition of this tool makes some hefty claims concerning creating valid xhtml/css based layouts. A normal person would reasonably expect a webpage promoting a tool used for webpage creation would most likely be built with the said tool. This would demonstrate the level of quality, the level of EXCELLENCE made possible by purchasing and using it.
Let’s have a look…
First we use a little browser called Firefox and a plugin called web developer to examine the layout of this page. By turning off CSS rendering we can examine the structure and determine how the creators approached the design process.
We clearly see that the developers of the expression site have chosen to use a table based, transitional approach (tables for the main layout, css to move things around within the columns). Well ok, I would have expected them to show off the “css layout” capabilities of the tool a bit more, but this in and of itself is still an acceptable practice.
With Expression web you can: “Validate your site with Compatibility reporting and use the Accessibility report to verify your site against Section 508 and W3C Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).”
Well ok – let’s do some of that to the Expression Web “features” page and see what we get! (using Firefox’s handy developer tools of course).
WHOA! Did they not even listen to their own marketing garbage? 144 Errors! No DocType? Are you kidding me?
The validation report is littered with opening tags that are never closed, closing tags that were never opened, several tags that are not part of ANY of the w3 HTML specifications, dozens of properties on tags that are also not part of any specification, Don’t believe me – see for yourself
Bravo to our good friends at Microsoft for setting such a great example and leading the masses to a more standards compliant internet! (and for giving web standards geeks something to hate on)
November 17th, 2006 at 4:46 pm #d
Irony, like this page doesnt validate irony
November 25th, 2006 at 9:23 pm #Andrei
Err… The site made “hefty claims about making valid xhtml…”
You validated in HTML 4.01 Transitional
Validating in XHTML 1.0 Strict returns… wait for it… 239 errors.
December 8th, 2006 at 11:45 am #SF
@d – where’s the irony here? I don’t see this site/page/blog claiming anything about standards-compliance (let alone selling a tool that claims to be industry-leading in that respect), but MS’s index page for a product that claims to do EXACTLY THAT is pretty obviously a piss-poor example of their shoddiness and lack of attention to detail.
December 8th, 2006 at 1:03 pm #JTMS
Andrei – they didn’t even have a doctype :-)
May 4th, 2007 at 3:03 pm #Russ Helfand
I would be grateful if you would re-examine and re-assess your analysis of the Microsoft Expression web site, http://www.microsoft.com/expression. I believe you will find that since you published your original observations a great deal has changed. Nearly the whole site is now ported to fairly vanilla ASP.NET (with progressive enhancement from ASP.NET AJAX). I also written the CSS. To my knowledge all of the ASPX pages (not the lingering few MSPX pages) are 100% compliant with XHTML 1.1 standards per validation from the W3.org markup validator. Likewise, I believe all ASPX pages are 100% 508 compliant (based on Cynthia analysis). If you find exceptions, please let me know as I am trying to fix them as I find them so they don’t accumulate.
FYI, I am the guy who wrote the ASP.NET CSS Friendly Control Adapters, http://www.asp.net/cssadapters and am now the web dev for the Expression web site. The past is the past. I wasn’t involved in the work that you evaluated previously (above). I do hope that you are willing to give the site and the product line a fresh look.
It’s completely fair to criticize when things are wrong. It’s also fair to recognize when they quickly get better.
February 5th, 2008 at 12:14 pm #R O Cox
I am new to Expression Web and find it relatively easy to use and for the most part (according Firefox Web Developer) it produces excellent code. One thing that really distresses me is the bug associated with EW’s use of the Bye Order Mark. While I am not and never will be a programmer, I enjoy producing results that meets quality standards. Unless I hack the template/default files, there is no way I can produce a website that meets W3C standards. Not a single similar EW user will ever produce a site that meets those standards. The BOM error will always occur. It is apparent that MS does not want to support PHP or other similar products. I am not sure if this was an oversight or a purposeful deed. The Beta EW apparently had a button to remove the BOM. I simply can’t find it in my version. I have seen it used in an example on an EW tutorial. When you are responsible for more than 77 percent of the browser population and a similar percent of daily use office products you have a responsibility to do the job right. I hope that MS addresses this issue as soon as possible and provides a product that works.
March 22nd, 2008 at 12:04 am #Anna Ullrich
Hi R O Cox,
I’m on the Expression Web team. In the BETA, you can find that information in the Help under the topic “Add or remove byte order marks” where it provides you with the following 3 sets of procedures. Also note that we have a new forum for Expression Web at http://forums.expression.microsoft.com/en-US/web/threads/
To add or not add a BOM to new documents:
On the Tools menu, click Page Editor Options.
In the Page Editor Options dialog box, on the Authoring tab, under New Documents, under Add a byte order mark (BOM) to new UTF-8 documents with these file extensions, clear the box next to each file extension you do not want to have a BOM.
To add or remove a BOM from an existing page
Open the web page.
Do one of the following:
On the File menu, click Properties.
In Code view, right-click anywhere in the page, and then click Encoding.
In the Page Properties dialog box, on the Language tab, select or clear Include a byte order mark (BOM).
Note:
The option Include a byte order mark (BOM) is not available if Save the document as is not set to Unicode (UTF-8).
To add or remove a BOM from an existing page or other document
Open the document.
In the document, in Code view, right-click anywhere, and then click Encoding.
In the Text File Encoding dialog box, select or clear Include a byte order mark (BOM).
Anna
February 25th, 2009 at 7:20 pm #Upgrade to Firefox the Better Solution Because IE7 Can Lead to Chaos
[...] http://shifteleven.com/articles/2006/11/16/why-microsoft-expression-web-redefines-irony Wow, this is absolutely devastating! As near as I can tell, the poor guy at Microsoft has been trying to support open standards against management. He doesn’t say much about the history, i.e. the fact that Microsoft didn’t do anything with IE until they were recently forced to by Firefox competition. The feedback is amazing. Example: [...]
February 26th, 2009 at 12:09 pm #Inetrnet Explorer Users Denied Access to Web Sites
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