Microsoft Expression Web is the newest Web editing and management application from Microsoft. It is a professional design tool used to create modern, standards-based sites that deliver superior quality on the Web. Expression Web also holds the distinction of being the replacement for Microsoft Office FrontPage, a long-lived and very popular Web editing and management tool.
Expression Web can be purchased alone or as part of Microsoft Expression Studio, which is an integrated group of applications that, besides Expression Web, includes the following:
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Expression Blend. A professional design tool used to create engaging, Webconnected multimedia experiences for Windows.
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Expression Design. A professional illustration and graphic design tool used for building compelling elements for both Web and desktop application user interfaces.
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Expression Media. A professional asset management tool for visually cataloging and organizing all your digital assets, and that provides for effortless retrieval and presentation.
From the perspective of a designer or developer, the modern Web bears only a slight resemblance to the Web of as little as five years ago. Expression Web is an effort by Microsoft to provide a tool that helps designers attain modern Web design standards and practices to a large group of designers.
Expression Web includes features that help ensure your output keeps within the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) validity standards, and that enable you to cleanly separate content from presentation by taking advantage of the functionality and capabilities in cascading style sheets.
As you drill deeper into Expression Web, you will find tools to make working with Microsoft ASP.NET much more comfortable than ever before, such as the ASP.NET Development Server that installs with Expression Web and the ASP.NET Controls group in the Toolbox task pane.
Expression Web helps you easily use some of the new features in ASP.NET 2.0, which are just the ticket for designers interested in validity, accessibility, and a best practices type of workflow. Specifically, ASP.NET Master Pages, Navigation Controls, and Data Controls spring to mind. It's refreshing that tools with this type of power are available in a user-friendly "designer's" application like Expression Web as opposed to being relegated to a very "programmer-oriented" tool such as Microsoft Visual Web Developer or Microsoft Visual Studio.
