Articles

Microsoft Underdog As Expression Web Takes On Dreamweaver

4th March 2008

When Microsoft released Office 2007, Microsoft FrontPage was conspicuous by its absence. Its place has been taken by Microsoft Expression Web, a product which clearly aims to take some of Adobe Dreamweaver's huge share of the web design market. For once Microsoft finds itself playing the role of underdog and is sensibly adopting some of the tactics used by Adobe in gaining their dominant position in web design software.

Expression Web is part of Expression Studio, which also includes Expression Design, a graphics tool which focuses on the creation of web interfaces. The full version of Expression Studio also includes Visual Studio 2005 Standard Edition. Although Expression Studio is by no means a direct competitor to Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft are clearly aiming to create a solution for professional web designers similar to the one available from Adobe. So, how good is Expression Web and will it enable Microsoft to make serious inroads into Adobe's share of the professional web development market?

The short answer is "Yes". Expression Web is not simply a new version of FrontPage. It does not rely on FrontPage extensions to create functionality. Instead, it offers a professional, standards-compliant web development platform which makes it easy for both inexperienced and seasoned web designers to create accessible web pages using XHML, CSS, XML and JavaScript. It also out-performs Dreamweaver in accurately rendering CSS layouts in the design environment.

On the downside, Expression Web only runs on Windows and its tight integration with Visual Studio suggests that a Mac version may be some time in arriving, assuming one ever does arrive. A significant number of web designers prefer to use Macs and, for this reason, will never see Expression Web as a serious rival to Dreamweaver. To win over such Mac diehards, Microsoft will have to make Expression Web not just as good as Dreamweaver but significantly better.

Another potential weakness in Expression Web is that its server-side support is limited to ASP.Net. Dreamweaver offers support for ASP, ASP.Net, PHP, Coldfusion and JSP. This having been said, Dreamweaver's server-side facilities are fairly long in the tooth and have not been significantly upgraded for about five years and there is still no support for ASP.Net 2.0. It could therefore be argued that both Expression Web and Dreamweaver are lacking in the server-side development area.

Dreamweaver's relative maturity in the market place gives it a huge advantage. There are over a million web developers using the program. It is perceived as the industry standard for web page creation. As well as the program itself, third-party developers have also created hundreds of useful add-ons ("Dreamweaver extensions" ) which offer such enhanced features as ecommerce and security. Although Expression Web has similar support for add-ons, it will be some years before they significantly enhance the functionality of the basic program.

In short, Expression Web is a worthy competitor to Adobe Dreamweaver. Both are aimed at casual as well as professional web designers and developers. Hopefully, the eventual winner of the competition between Microsoft and Adobe will be the increasing number of ordinary people who find themselves thrust into the ever-changing world of web content creation.

Back to top

Back to Articles