François Nonnenmacher (EN) | FR

There will be a lot of scrutiny on this thing from the web-standards community as soon as it will ship.

In a previous life (before the web, yes, there was such a time) I used to have this theory that Microsoft slowed down progress for the whole world by at least 10 years. I reckoned that at the time I lost, numbered in weeks per year, because of the lame decisions in DOS regarding memory, hardware interfaces, etc. that continuously forced us to hundreds of trial-and-error games like "this card should be plugged here but then this one stops working and none of the other slots seem to work unless we work out another IRQ sequence".

FrontPage, to me, has been the software equivalent of that MS-DOS nightmare, applied to the web. As Zeldman politely nailed it in this interview: "FrontPage is not a Web editor, it’s an Internet Explorer production tool. There is a difference." I'm known at my workplace to describe it more like "the worst piece of sh*t the software industry has ever dared to market." FrontPage-produced horrors, or the simple fact that it can destroy a perfectly good template as easy as "open, save", made me lost so much time that I had to officially forbid its use within my vicinity or send back its users from the hell they come from without any support but pity.

By reading between lines on that CNet article, I have some fear that FP will move from an IE to a SharePoint production tool. We shall see.