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Quick Fact Sheet on FrontPage and FrontPage Server Extensions

The following are tips and tricks for making your FrontPage Web site compatible with all Web browsers. Also included is a list of what is not available (will not work) if the server that is hosting the Web site does not have FrontPage server extensions installed.

Web Page Compatibility

When designing a Web page, you must decide whether it is worth it to use elements in your pages that a portion of your audience will not be able to view or use. If you decide to design a Web page without features that cannot be viewed by everyone, you can make those features unavailable to you when you are creating Web pages.

Select Tools and click Page Options. Click the Compatibility tab. There are three options:

• Browsers: Because Netscape and Internet Explorer recognize code and scripts in different ways, when you select a specific browser you can only use features that that browser recognizes.

• Browser versions: Older browsers do not support some of the newer Web features such as DHTML and cascading style sheets so you can disable the availability of those features.

• Servers: You can select a different server if the Web site is not hosted on an Internet Information Server, and/or a server without FrontPage server extensions installed. This prevents you from selecting an option that will not work on a specific server configuration.

FrontPage Server Extensions

A FrontPage Server Extension is software code containing instructions for how something is supposed to work on a Web page. Server Extensions are stored on servers hosting Web pages. FrontPage Components such as Hit Counters and Forms require Server Extensions to be installed on the server or they will not work. Server Extensions are installed as a group and not all servers that host Web pages have FrontPage Server Extensions installed.

The following features require the FrontPage Server Extensions:

• Database Results Wizard: WebBot Save Results component

• Send To Database Form Handler

• Nested sub webs

• Lightweight Source Control (document check-in/check-out without VSS)

• Categories Component

• StyleSheet links to multiple files or ASP files

• Confirmation Field: WebBot Confirmation Field component

• Discussion Form Handler: WebBot Discussion component

• FrontPage-created server-side image maps

• Hit Counter

• Registration Form Handler: WebBot Registration component

• Save Results Form Handler: WebBot Save Results component

• Search Form: WebBot Search component

• WebBot Scheduled Image component

• WebBot Scheduled Include component

Home Page Identification

When you create a FrontPage Web in Windows 2000 and Windows NT, FrontPage creates a home page with the file name index.htm. If your Web Server supports a different filename as your home page, you can rename this file.

File Name Extensions

Different Web servers may have different rules for mapping file name extensions to Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) types. For example, a Windows-based server may recognize only .htm as HyperText Markup Language (HTML), while a UNIX-based server may recognize only .html.

NOTE: You can reconfigure your working server to match the target server. The FrontPage wizards and templates generate pages that have the .htm extension. If possible, you should make sure that your target server recognizes the .htm extension for HTML files.

All folders beginning with _vti_:

These folders contain information for use only when the FrontPage Server Extensions are present.

Subwebs vs. Subdirectories

Subwebs and subdirectories are both folders within a root directory. The difference is that a subweb is treated as a completely different Web site in FrontPage. This means that if you have a subweb and you want to create a link to a page in another subweb in the root, you will need to create an absolute hyperlink (a link to the full URL) rather than creating a relative link (a link to a page without the full http:// address). You also cannot search across subwebs. If the Web site files were stored in subdirectories, you could.