One of the tricks that can fool the novice Web designer is the "HTML" tab in Microsoft FrontPage. Many designers believe that this tab is an actual copy of the HTML that will be uploaded to your Web site, but it really isn't. Microsoft FrontPage does a number of things to the HTML display that work with the editor itself.
FrontPage is not a text editor
This tab makes it appear that FrontPage is a text editor, and it does have a lot of the features that make up a great text editor. But this tab does not show you the true HTML that will be displayed to your readers.
What Does this Tab Show?
There are several things that this tab does to work with FrontPage more effectively:
- If you are using shared borders, they will not display in the HTML tab view.
- Items such as parameters will display as comments for FrontPage to fill in when the page is uploaded - rather than with the actual content.
- Other items, such as meta tags might be displayed with additional spaces to make them easier to read (true in older versions of FrontPage).
This does not mean that you shouldn't use the HTML tab to make edits and learn HTML. But you should be aware that what you're looking at in the HTML code view and the HTML that is sent to browsers might be very different.
If you decide to use FrontPage solely as a text editor, it is definitely possible to do, but many of the features of FrontPage are not as readily available in the HTML tab view.
