It seems Microsoft has at last worked out that Adobe's trying to take over the Web and graphics world. It's now set out to play catch up to Creative Suite 3 with its own Expression Studio. This suite comprises four applications: Expression Blend, Expression Design, Expression Media and the subject of this review, Expression Web.

Expression Web is a Web site design editor, like DreamWeaver. In fact, very like DreamWeaver. The main editing page offers the same graphic and code split-view and borders this with separate palettes for tag properties, HTML tags and styles. You can edit in true DTP fashion, hard code your site by hand or flick freely between the two modes.

By selecting the schema you want to work with - the browser or range of browsers you want to ensure compatibility with - Expression Web reports and highlights any parts of your XHTML code which conflict with those browsers' capabilities. By getting the design right from the start, Microsoft's argument goes, you'll need to put in less work later, if you need to modify for a revised schema or add extra pages to your site.

The application produces CSS-based, accessibility-standard-compliant pages straight out of the box and can import and handle XML and XHTML with ease. You can apply CSS visually and use layers to separate page components, for interesting overlap effects. Expression Web flight-checks pages produced with these standards to ensure compliance, and is, as you'd expect, good at handling server-side scripting models, particularly ASP.Net. It's not so good, though, when it comes to non-Microsoft standards, like PHP and JSP, which get little support.

One of the main claims for Expression Web is the accuracy of its visual page display - you shouldn't need to keep previewing in a separate browser. From our use of the software, this seems right, but if you still want to preview in different browsers at various points in development, the program enables you to set the browser resolution (800 x 600 or 1,024 x 768) to see how things hang together at common screen sizes.

The software comes with a separate DVD of training tutorials and, while they're all rather American, the content is solid and helps you get a grip on the newer functionality in the application, such as using dynamic Web templates and working with ASP.Net.

There's also a set of handy, tabbed CSS Selector flip-cards, giving reminders of the different class, ID and element selectors. Alas, there's no printed manual, though; you still have to fumble around with disk-based documentation.

Verdict
If you need a standards-based Web design tool with a high level of visual accuracy, Expression Web could be what you need. It has better control of raw code than FrontPage and is a good bit cheaper than DreamWeaver. It doesn't have the level of integration with other Microsoft products that DreamWeaver has with Photoshop and Illustrator, though.

Company: Microsoft

Contact: 0870 6010 100

Tags: cascading style sheets html element microsoft web design html javascript xhtml world wide web consortium