John Heaton

When I attended the WWW4 conference in Boston in December 1995, I saw an early version of the FrontPage program (which was then being marketed by Vermeer Technologies Ltd), and although it looked good, the 'special conference price of $400' seemed to be a bit steep, so I quickly moved on to the next stand!

Since then, the product has appeared under the Microsoft banner as Microsoft FrontPage v1.1 and the price has been reduced quite a bit, especially for existing Office 95 users. Microsoft has since updated the program as FrontPage 97 and has also made available a 'time-crippled' version for beta testing. This trial version expires at the end of January 1997, but over the Christmas/New Year break I have been having a play around with the program. Once I had the program installed on my system at home, I sat there and stared at the screen trying to work out what to try it out on, and then I thought, 'Why not use FrontPage 97 to spice up the MIDAS Newsletter?'.

During the last 4 years or so, Roz has been letting me have a copy of the National Newsletter and later the MIDAS and HPC Newsletters as a WordPerfect file, which, in the early days, I converted to HTML using Softquad HoTMetaL and, more recently, using the Internet Assistant add-on to Microsoft Word 7.

I took the November 1996 issue of the MIDAS Newsletter, which was already on-line as a set of simple HTML files and then transformed them in FrontPage.

From within the 'FrontPage Explorer' program (Figure 2, right) you can edit any page on the local web or any other page linked to the local web by double-clicking its icon. The 'FrontPage Editor' looks very much like a WWW browser, and can also be used to edit any remote document on the Internet. It also keeps track of all the hyperlinks, and indicates any unknown links with a broken line.

For anyone who has used any of the Microsoft Office tools before such as Word; Access or Excel, you will feel right at home with FrontPage, as it adopts the same 'Look and Feel' and I found it very simple and straightforward to use at once.

I have put both the normal version (Figure 3, left) and the Frontpage version on-line, and then waited for the feedback, of which there were only two negative comments on the new format, so whilst in the right mood I copied all the old newsletters off onto a ZIP disc and took them home. Using Frontpage, I totally reorganized the newsletter directory tree, and have converted all the MIDAS Newsletters (1995/1996) to the new format (Figure 4, below).

Originally, I used the 'MIDAS banner' and 'yellow MIDAS' backdrop for each of the newsletter pages to keep in step with the main MIDAS web pages, but removed it from the new format to make the page load up a bit faster.

The new format makes use of tables within tables and coloured table cells, so ideally you should be using either Netscape Navigator v3.xx onwards or Microsoft Internet Explorer v3.xx onwards. If you are using Netscape Navigator v1.1 - v2.02 or an earlier version of Microsoft Internet Explorer, you should still be able to see the new page layout, but without coloured cells. People with versions of browsers earlier than these are recommended to upgrade. (There are still some people using v0.90 version of Netscape Navigator out there ...) If you are using any other browser, fear not, I have kept the previous versions of the newsletters just for you.

You can find the MIDAS newsletters at:

http://www.mcc.ac.uk/newsletters/ (new format)

and http://www.mcc.ac.uk/newsletters.old/ (old format)

Please look at both formats and let Roz (the Newsletter Editor) know which one you prefer (email: Roz [AT] mcc.ac.uk).

You can read more about FrontPage at the Microsoft WWW site at the URL:

http://www.microsoft.com/frontpage/

Microsoft, FrontPage, Windows, WebBot, Windows NT and PowerPoint are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corp. in the United States and/or other countries.