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Microsoft have released Expression – a new suite of creative products to compete with the usual suspects from Macromedia and Adobe. The new web development tool, Quartz, was of particular interest for me.

The other two members of Expression are Acrylic (Illustrator/Photoshop nemesis) and Sparkle (Flash, GoLive, Director etc. nemesis. I just can’t get the Mr. Sparkle theme song out of my head now. What a silly name for a product.)

I’ve heard some good things about Acrylic, but nothing so far about Quartz or Sparkle. What raised my eyebrows the most when reading the product features was the boasts made about Quartz:

• Advanced Web site design. “Quartz Web Designer” enables the direct manipulation of positioning, sizing and padding with CSS page layouts. The flexible, designer-focused work space provides easy access to task panes, toolbars and features. In addition, the rich design-time experience combined with integrated design and code views helps to deliver differentiated Web sites.
• Standards-based design. Web designers can create accessible, standards-based Web sites by default and configure flexible schema settings to support all combinations of HTML, XHTML and CSS standards as well as browser schemas. Built-in compatibility and accessibility checkers ensure that Web sites render properly in any browser.
• Support for XML, ASP.NET and XHTML offers easy integration between Web design and development teams with “Quartz Web Designer” and Visual Studio.

Woah. Now I don’t want to Microsoft bash here, but that’s some big claims from the people that brought you Frontpage. On that note, I could help but guffaw at this line in the FAQ section:

Expression Web Designer is a new product for professional Web designers that combines the best of both FrontPage and Visual Studio technologies in a pro designer user interface for creating XHTML, CSS, XML, XSLT, and ASP.Net 2.0.

Hah! Best of Frontpage. Classic. Digressing: all these promises of CSS and XHTML compliant sites are intriguing. And cross browser compatibility! Seems almost to good to be true.

Now, not meaning to be Devil’s Advocate here, but none of the pages on the Expression site validate, and most of the site looked pretty dubious in Firefox. I also got a bunch of Javascript errors on the demo pages. Proving how curious I was about this new suite, I fired up Internet Explorer and tried the demo page in there: it loaded an embedded video, which promptly spat the dummy after the server didn’t respond.

But let’s be pragmatic. It’s a definite philosophical step in the right direction for Microsoft. Now it’s just a matter of waiting for the betas to come out to see just how Quartz really performs – whether it’s just a hyped up Frontpage or actually something useful.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 15th, 2005 at 2:28 pm and is filed under Web Design + Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.