The Bitter Pill

And there shall be much rejoicing across the land: Microsoft is killing off FrontPage.

‘Bout time. This wretched piece of crap-ware is (arguably) the worst thing that ever happened to the web.

Thanks to FrontPage, a gazillion people decided somewhere along the way that they were web designers, despite an utter lack of talent or ability providing considerable evidence to the contrary.

Thanks in large part to FrontPage, the web is loaded down with bloated, ugly pages, full of bloated, ugly code, and we accept the trash as normal. It doesn’t have to be so. It shouldn’t be so.

But this isn’t just web elitism, although I am admittedly something of an elitist. It’s about wanting the web to be a better place — a rising tide lifts all boats, and all that.

HTML authors who don’t use FrontPage have a fighting chance of actually learning something, someday. Many don’t, but some do. FrontPage ensures garbage. It will always be garbage, and the people using it will never know any better.

Someday, someone who does have a clue will be asked to clean the mess up. My asking price doubles if I have to clean up FrontPage code, because my time on the project just doubled.

At any rate, Microsoft’s announcement amounts to a mercy killing. FrontPage has inflicted enough harm over the years, and we’ll all be a lot better off without it.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 17th, 2006 at 9:21 am and is filed under General, Geekery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.