Expression Web Designer Previewed

A preview version of Microsoft’s Expression Web Designer, a tool for professional Web page authors, is now available. The Web Designer, formerly known by the code-name Quartz, is part of a family of products aimed at graphics and design professionals. Web Designer fills an important gap in Microsoft’s Web authoring tools by giving Web designers a tool for creating Web sites based on standards such as XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), while also providing support for ASP.NET 2.0. A final ship date for the tool has not been announced.

Standards and ASP.NET 2.0

Like most Web design tools, Expression Web Designer provides both a WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) view and an HTML view of Web pages. However, it provides some important capabilities that no other Microsoft authoring tool provides, including the following:

CSS support. CSS is far and away the most common way for Web site designers to specify the appearance of Web pages. Rather than embedding formatting information (such as colors and fonts) on each and every element of a Web page, CSS employs a single style sheet to describe how all of the elements should appear. The appearance of a Web site can then be updated by changing the style sheet. Expression Web Designer makes it easier for designers to author style sheets visually and to describe the relationships between styles.