No Expression Web Designer at MIX? The reason...
It’s fascinating, not to say immensely heartening, to see all the speculation arising from the fact that we won’t be shipping a CTP of Expression Web Designer at our MIX Conference in Las Vegas. It’s heartening because the whole team is excited that so many people can’t wait to get their hands on the code!
I read the speculation in this article on Microsoft Watch with great interest and thought I’d try to post a clear reason for the delay.
As any attendee at MIX who chooses to attend my session with Linda Weinman will see, Expression Web Designer is an awesome program, packed with features that people are going to love. I won’t list them out here, check out the Expression website for more.
What I will say is that we do want you to play with a CTP as soon as we can. We hoped it would have been at MIX, it just didn’t quite come together. We’re close, real close, but there were some stability issues with the codebase that we really wanted to iron out. We didn’t want you to overlook the cool features because of a little instability. Rest assured, we’re working flat out to bring you the bits just as soon as we can.
posted by Wayne Smith @ 10:19 AM
1 Comments:
At 13:44,
Anonymous said…
Hi Wayne,
I think this it is a good idea to make sure the product is ready for testing even as a CTP, so I don't begrudge the delay.
One thing I think is vital for Expression Web Designer to compete in the Professional Designer space is to make sure that it is fully standards compliant. In addition, if the goal is to lure designers away from products like Dreamweaver, support for PHP would be vital. I know that it is a competitor, but many Dreamweaver users code in PHP and making it so Web Designer doesn't understand PHP will just lead to hard to read code when they are designing.
Even if there isn't native support, perhaps providing an API or plugin capability will at least allow developers to write their own interface.
The last thing and probably the most important is creating a consistent look across browsers when using design mode. If what you create in Expression Web Designer doesn't look the same in Firefox as it does in IE, you won't get many professionals to drop their current tools.
I think the product looks really promising. Especially the ability to visually adjust CSS margins, etc. If you find a way to make a cross browser compatible product that doesn't reduce a professional's ability to design, you will have yourself a winner.
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