How do front page server extensions work?

Question

I have a website that I inherited and I think it uses FrontPage. I'm assuming the server has FrontPage extensions installed on it.

There is a table of contents page "toc.htm" and inside the default.htm page there is this

<!--webbot bot="Include" U-Include="toc.htm" TAG="BODY" startspan -->

tag. Following the tag is the entire contents of the toc.htm file.

Now does that mean that the site is still using front page and that is valid front page syntax or does that mean that they discontinued using front page and commented out their front page code?

I would like to simply change the toc.htm file to link to a new page I built. If frontpage server extensions is installed, will the change in the toc file be automatically detected and all the pages that reference it be updated?

The application is in production so I don't have access to go testing this out.

I also do not have frontpage.

Answer 1

Ok, I figured this out a bit.

I copied the prod website onto my local and started serving it using IIS. I changed the toc.htm to have my new link.

In my windows XP I added FrontPage 2000 by going to add remove programs -> add windows components -> IIS -> FrontPage 2000 Server Extensions

Then I was able to go to Administrative Tools -> Server Extensions Administrator In there I had to refresh my site. Then All Tasks -> Configure Server extensions - > Cancel Then for some reason more options pop up. All Tasks -> Recalculate Web

And front page takes those weird tags and copied the toc.htm contents to every other html page that referenced it. Hooray!

Now lets see if it works in a test environment.