Microsoft Expression Web Takes On The Mighty Dreamweaver
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.
Like Dreamweaver, Expression Web forms part of a software bundle, in this case, Expression Studio. Microsoft were the ones who introduced the concept of software bundles, so no one can accuse them of copying the Adobe Creative Suite. Expression Studio contains a full version of Visual Studio 2005 Standard, Expression Blend, Expression Design, Expression Media and, of course, Expression Web. It's not as powerful a suite as any of the various combinations of Adobe Creative Suite, but it's still early days. So, are Microsoft on to a winner here? Could Expression Web ever become a Dreaweaver-killer?
At this stage, one would have to say that it is unlikely to become a Dreaweaver-killer. However, it is a serious contender and will undoubtedly take some of Adobe's market share. Microsoft have created a program which is not simply a reworked version of FrontPage. Expression Web is a standards-compliant development environment which enables web designers to create pages visually and automatically generates the necessary code: XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, XSLT and ASP.Net.
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.
There are over a million web developers using Adobe Dreamweaver and the program is recognised as the industry-standard in visual web development software. It's maturity in the market place gives the program a huge advantage over Expression Web. Third-party developers have also created hundreds of useful add-ons ("Dreamweaver extensions" ) which provide such features as ecommerce and XML integration to the basic program. Microsoft recognises the importance of add-ons and have given Expression Web similar extensibility but it will be some years before they have any chance of catching up.
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.
