DavidF said:
Rob, your analogy is simply not based in fact or reality and you know it.
Just another red herring...
To anyone coming upon this thread, contrary to what Rob or Eric say or
suggest, the *facts* are that Publisher while primarily a DTP can indeed
be a good web building tool and a good choice for building relatively
simple, small, static websites that are cross browser compatible. The
facts are there are *no* logical or rational reasons to not use Publisher
in this manner, especially if you already own the program and use it to
build print publications. Furthermore the sample sites shown in this
thread go to prove and demonstrate how good of sites can be built....if
you use the tool correctly.
Not to put too fine a point on it, this is of course complete nonsense.
From the help documentation of Publisher 2007 itself comes this:
----------------
Office Publisher 2007 is not the appropriate tool in the following cases:
If your Web site needs interactivity or database-driven content, so that
visitors can respond in a Web log (blog)
or purchase items in a shopping cart
If your Web site requires data validation, such as for verifying credit card
numbers
If you expect to later alter the raw HTML code in an HTML editor after you
create your Web site in Office
Publisher 2007, which combines HTML, XML (Extensible Markup Language (XML):
A condensed form of Standard
Generalized Markup Language (SGML) that enables developers to create
customized tags that offer flexibility
in organizing and presenting information.), and VML (Vector Markup Language
(VML): A system of marking up,
or tagging, two-dimensional vector graphics for publishing on the World Wide
Web. VML graphics are scalable
and editable, usually take less time to download, and require less disk
space.) code to produce Web sites
For basic Web hosting and online site authoring, Microsoft Office Live may
be the right tool for you. For
information, go to the Microsoft Office Live Web site.
For interactive Web sites, the Microsoft Expression Web provides tools for
producing data-rich, standards-based
Web sites. For information, go to the Microsoft Expression Web site.
-----------------
....coming from Microsoft in the products own documentation, that's pretty
remarkable in being about as strong a recommendation not to use it as you
will ever see. Summarising, it actually says you shouldn't use Publisher
because it generates proprietary non-standard output which can't be edited
with any other tool, isn't standards compliant and can't be used in a useful
way if your site requires any sort of interactivity.
Furthermore it recommends the use of Office Live or Expression Web Designer
instead.
As for using it 'correctly', what David means by this is using it in a way
which avoids or masks the numerous bugs in the product - which of course are
not documented anywhere, and mostly seem to have been carried over
successive versions and which MS seem to show no inclination towards even
acknowledging existence, let alone fixing.
How can this be a 'good' tool?
The answer is in part that Publisher is a fairly good tool for dtp in print,
which is what it is designed for - not making web pages, which it is
unlikely to ever be much good at because making web pages and print material
are two tasks which are just too different in nature. Even the dtp
heavyweights Quark and Adobe have failed to make anything genuinely useful
to solve this problem in Xpress and Indesign - in fact one could even argue
that Microsoft did a better job in Publisher (2000).
As for this newsgroup, it is indeed depressing that many people obviously
just starting out with Publisher and hitting problems get such a superficial
level of assistance, generally speaking. The best advice they could receive
is that the problems they've almost certainly got are because of the
failings of Publisher, not the way they are using it, and that they would
save themselves a lot of pain for reasons they haven't even come across yet
by using something else, or trying to better understand whatever it is they
are trying to do.
The evidence is there to be seen that most users eventually discover this
for themselves anyway - for instance, the list of Publisher sites given by
Don earlier is now largely a list of sites which have now been created by
something else, and are undoubtedly much improved as a result.
Maybe David would like to write a piece on how Publisher users can make
their web pages comply with what is now law in many countries, in the form
of disability discrimination requirements?
