Designer HTML

Designer HTML is the term we use to describe an important new extension to the FrontPage HTML Markup component. In FrontPage, you could always insert pieces of HTML into a page, even when FrontPage could not recognize those HTML tags (e.g., new HTML tags that were invented after the latest version of FrontPage, or authoring tool-specific tags that are often used in a pre-processing step before producing output HTML.) This appeared in the FrontPage Editor as an “unknown HTML” icon.

With Designer HTML, developers get two key pieces of new functionality in FrontPage:

1. The ability to specify an alternate display in the Editor for a piece of unknown HTML
   
   
2. The ability to insert, or drag and drop pieces of unknown HTML into the Editor

Combined with menu customization, these two features provide a powerful, well-integrated HTML extensibility mechanism which is WYSIWYG and entirely code free.

This chapter describes the extensions we’ve made to our WEBBOT pseudo-tag that allows for alternate representations of the underlying HTML, when it’s displayed in the FrontPage Editor. We’ll also offer several examples which show off the power and elegance of this HTML extensibility design.