by jregist
14. April 2009 04:20
Michael O’Donovan’s post about it is typical of posts about this story, but what I haven’t seen is some opinions about what this might mean. It seems to me that giving away something for free is always at least in part an acknowledgement that it has no value. Or is about to be supplanted by something new and better. I suppose I kind of agree with the first part of this but I’m hoping that the second part is also true. If you have used SharePoint Design (SDP) to edit pages on SharePoint, you know that we need something better. In particular, there needs to be a way to take what you create with SPD and move it to a different site or site collection on SharePoint. Right now, this issue is just one of the things that makes SPD (and SharePoint for that matter) deeply flawed.
Both SPD and Expression Web have some significant problems, I feel. I find myself always preferring Visual Studio 2008 – probably because it gets me closer to the source html. The biggest problem I have with these tools is often when trying to do what Microsoft pitched as their strengths – getting designers to use them to work on projects with me. The separation of the programmer and code from the design is just not clean enough – not well defined, consistent, and always enforceable.
I don’t know what’s in store for SharePoint; I hold out hope for good things. But I’m also realistic enough to recognize that we’re likely to see many if not most of the same problems in the next version as we see in the current version. Success is often not conducive to thinking deeply about your product or significantly changing or addressing its inherent shortcomings (such as the ambiguous status of the page in SharePoint – is is a publishing page or not? why should I have to care? and why isn’t it automatically incorporated into a site’s navigation controls regardless?). But I certainly hope for some good things. And getting SPD out of the picture can’t hurt. It was always neither fish nor fowl. Not quite adequate as a general purpose html editor and frustrating when trying to do anything non-trivial with it in SharePoint.
When you do so much of your page editing work in SharePoint directly in the UI (by adding web controls and setting properties), why can’t you incorporate data views, minor page layout changes, and page design changes into the process using that same metaphor?
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