CssMySite

In 1996, Microsoft released FrontPage 1.0. One of the first distributed web authoring tools, it let the users save their work directly to the HTTP server (if the server had the FrontPage extensions installed, of course.) This let authors work remotely instead of having to be connected to the LAN containing the physical storage.

Needless ot say, FrontPage became the darling of the early web. Its WYSIWYG editor let anybody — regardless of web knowledge, design ability or taste — publish websites.

Now the FrontPage web pages are like the old chain-smoking, whiskey-drinking, gaudy great-aunt who stays too long and talks too loud. She's fun to be around for about three minutes but after that she gets rather tiresome.

FrontPage produced an ugly mess of non-standard HTML sprinkled with IE specific tags. As you clicked save, you could almost hear Frontpage yell, "<BLINK> <MARQUEE> <O:P> Suck on that Netscape Navigator!"

As web developers wanted more control over their code, WYSIWYG editors became passe and now the hallmark of a "real" developer is hand-coded html.