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What's happening to FrontPage?
After nine years of being an award-winning Web authoring tool, FrontPage will be discontinued in late 2006. Microsoft will continue to serve the diverse needs of our existing FrontPage customers with the introduction of two brand-new application building and Web authoring tools using the latest technologies: Office SharePoint Designer 2007 for the enterprise information workers and Expression Web for the professional Web designer.
FrontPage was initially created by the Cambridge, Massachusetts company Vermeer Technologies Incorporated, evidence of which can be easily spotted in filenames and directories prefixed _vti_ in web sites created using FrontPage. Vermeer was acquired by Microsoft in 1996 specifically so that Microsoft could add FrontPage to its product line-up.[1]
As a WYSIWYG editor, FrontPage is designed to hide the details of pages' HTML code from the user, making it possible for novices to easily create web pages and sites.
FrontPage's initial outing under the Microsoft name came in 1996 with the release of Windows NT 4.0 Server and its constituent HTTPd server Internet Information Services 2.0. Bundled on CD with the NT 4.0 Server release, FrontPage 1.1 would run under NT 4.0 (Server or Workstation) or Windows 95, and was aimed at providing server administrators with a tool to deliver rich web and intranet content in a package as easy to use as Microsoft Word.