In previous versions, most FrontPage components were represented inside a single HTML comment with a syntax like this:
<!--VERMEER Bot=BotName Attr1=”Xxx” Attr2=”Yyy” -->
Pages that contained FrontPage components were stored in a subdirectory of each web called “_vti_shm”, with the expanded browse-time presentation of the pages kept in the main web directory.
Most FrontPage components use a variation of this syntax that allows for storage of both the authoring-time attributes and the expanded browse-time HTML presentation inside a single logical construct. This removes the need to store two versions of each page. Here is an example of the new “spanning” syntax:
<!--WEBBOT Bot=BotName Attr1=”Xxx” Attr2=”Yyy” StartSpan -->
<P><STRONG>Expanded version of BotName</STRONG></P>
<!--WEBBOT Bot=BotName EndSpan I-CheckSum=Zzz -->
The new spanning syntax consists of a StartSpan comment, the spanned HTML that is generated by the FrontPage component, and an EndSpan comment. The EndSpan comment contains a computed checksum of the spanned HTML. The checksum allows the FrontPage Server Extensions and FrontPage to detect manual changes made to the spanned HTML, and either discard the changes or regenerate the spanned HTML as appropriate.
For backwards compatibility, FrontPage and the FrontPage Server Extensions can read the old syntax for FrontPage components. However, when the FrontPage component is expanded and saved, it will be stored using the new syntax unless the page is saved into a web with an older version of the FrontPage Server Extensions (prior to FrontPage 97).