How was this website made, what's Frontpage 5.0?

Question

A friend of mine had "a friend make a website" for her, but this person is no longer contactable, so she asked me "why it looks different in Firefox and the links don't work".

Looking at the source, it seems to have been made with "Frontpage 5.0" but also has a "Microsoft Office" XML namespace.

What I find interesting is that it apparently checks the browser and if it is not IE, it simply outputs a website made up of large, bad looking .gifs on which, not surprisingly, the links don't work.

Here is the site: http://sprachschule-polyglott.de

I'm theoretically interested in how this site was made, and thought it might be interesting for others, perhaps as an example for a presentation of the bad old days of the Internet, a relic from last decade's browser wars.

Can anyone tell me how this site was made?

• Was this made with Frontpage 98?
• Or is it just an export-to-website output from some version of Microsoft Word?
• I actually used Frontpage 98 back in the 90s but I don't recall even then that it output "an alternative website as .gifs" for Netscape. That's pretty non-compatible even for the day. Anyone know how the background to this method of "browser compatibility", was it an option in Frontpage or Microsoft word to "render as graphics for non-IE browsers"?

Answer 1

My bet is that it was made with Microsoft Publisher, which had an option to output the whole site as graphics. There was no standalone version of Front Page 5 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_FrontPage).

The VML used in the source code would give some clues to its age; the VML standard was proposed in 1998.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_Markup_Language

Another clue is the use of DHTML behaviors, which were introduced in IE 5.5 in 2000.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms531079(VS.85).aspx

Answer 2

The website (thank you for finding it - it's a gem) was created using Microsoft Publisher 2003 with the Frontpage 2002 Server Extensions.

Even though Wikipedia says there was no Frontpage version 5, it is not totally correct. This Frontpage Fanboy (who would have thought someone like this existed?) labels Frontpage 2002 as Version 5. Frontpage 2002 was delivered with Office XP and according to the official Microsoft page for the version of Office XP Frontpage 2002's release version was 10.2623.2625 - Wikipedia actually has this right... weird.

Searching Google you will find many references to "FrontPage 5.0" or the "FrontPage 5.0 Web Object Library" - the mystery continues, so what the heck is Frontpage 5.0?

Frontpage Server Extensions to the rescue! The Frontpage 2002 Server Extensions have the version number 5.0.2.6738. First mystery solved.

So why does the website render as GIF in Firefox and as a regular website in Internet Explorer? Microsoft Publisher to the rescue! (Lot's of rescuing being done here...) MS Publisher had the ability to publish a website as VML, GIFs as well as HTML. In case of our website-friend here it was Microsoft Publisher 2003 outputting "filtered HTML" - how do I know? The "filelist.xml" and all the VML code gives it away. This Microsoft Publisher blog post actually has a list of Publisher created website as well as an explanation on how to find out which version of Publisher was used:

If produced in Publisher's "Filtered" html (lightest page), and you see lots of VML/XML code and "filelist.xml" in the first few lines of the source it's 2003.

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To sum this up: The website was created using Microsoft Publisher 2003, outputting a "filtered" HTML. The server the website is running on, is using Frontpage 2002 Server Extensions.

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PS: I could be wrong about the last part (server running server extensions) - maybe Microsoft Publisher used the Frontpage 2002 Server Extensions to render the HTML and hence the Generator is "FrontPage 5.0"