Expression Web Ships

Expression Web, a new tool for creating and maintaining Web sites, improves Microsoft’s support for important Web standards, including Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), as well as features of ASP.NET 2.0. However, unlike previous Microsoft Web tools, Expression Web must be purchased separately; like the other members of the planned Expression product family, it is not included in MSDN Universal subscriptions.

Web Standards Support

Although FrontPage and Visual Studio both offer what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editing of HTML, neither is tailored for designers. Visual Studio, for example, uses a project system that is designed to scale up to extremely large application development projects but which is overkill for most Web sites, while FrontPage has been discontinued altogether.

Expression Web fills an important gap in Microsoft’s Web tools lineup by giving professional Web designers a tool that supports important Web standards

CSS. CSS is far and away the most common way for Web designers to specify the appearance of Web pages. Rather than embedding formatting information, such as color and fonts, in each element on a Web page, CSS allows designers to create a style sheet that describes the appearance of elements on a page and to apply those styles, rather than full formatting information, to the page elements. The appearance of the site can then be changed by updating the style sheet instead of updating each element of every page. Expression Web provides a WYSIWYG way to create and update style sheets and preview the results. Changing the font for a block of text, for example, automatically changes the underlying style sheet. Expression Web supports CSS versions 1.0, 2.0, and 2.1, as well as the subset of CSS used by Internet Explorer 6.0.