Some Examples

To make the power of Designer HTML a bit more clear, consider these scenarios:

• A web database connectivity tool includes Designer HTML files with their product, so that customers can use the FrontPage authoring environment to create the pages that connect to their database product. This means that the web database vendor doesn’t have to worry about creating a great WYSIWYG HTML editor. They can focus on the database side of the equation, which is what they do best. (e.g., Cold Fusion, Spider.)
  
  
• A commercial productivity application includes a utility to convert proprietary document formats into HTML. Although this data is generated dynamically by the application, they would like to make it easy to fit the legacy document information into a nicely designed web page. To do this in an automated fashion they have created their own “special” HTML tags that only their conversion tools knows about. This lets them use these HTML files with “special” tags as templates that can be filled in by the conversion process. However, they have no authoring tool for these “special” HTML tags because they just invented them, and they’re not standard. The solution? They ship some Designer HTML files with their product that integrate with FrontPage, allowing their customers to use FrontPage as a WYSIWYG editing environment for their template files with “special” HTML in them. The user sees a cleanly designed graphic representation of this “special” HTML, and they can edit it, or drag and drop it just like any other pieces of the Web page. (e.g., Microsoft Excel Internet Assistant, Microsoft Access Internet Assitant.)
  
  
• A small startup creates a pack of pre-defined JavaScripts, Java applets, or ActiveX Conrols. Along with these pieces, they ship Designer HTML files which allow their users to simply drag and drop pre-defined components with all of their properties pre-set. For instance, rather than just inserting a push button into a form field, they could easily insert an ActiveX push button control, with color, font, and text display properties already set, complete with JavaScript code attached for processing the form.

There are many more exciting integration opportunities available with Designer HTML, but this gives you some idea of the range of possibilities. You should also investigate the sample files in the Designer HTML folder in the SDK, and the sample files that ship with FrontPage itself. These offer some very specific examples of what is possible.