(June 11, 2003) - Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003, part of the Microsoft Office System, has been reinvented to support a wide range of capabilities for building XML-based, data-driven Web sites, while retaining ease of use. FrontPage 2003 will be the first commercially available, fully WYSIWYG XSLT editor in which users can work with live data to create interactive and dynamic Web sites.

"An important component to the Microsoft Office System, the FrontPage 2003 WYSIWYG editor lets you define how XML following customer-defined schema should be formatted on a Web page. This is done by authoring XSLT, a standard defined by the W3C," said Jean Paoli, an XML architect at Microsoft and one of the co-creators of the XML 1.0 standard. "The XML data-driven functionality makes it easier to transition content from internal systems onto the Web. Data-driven solutions in the past took days or even months of hand-coding, but these can now be accomplished in just hours."

FrontPage 2003 supports a complete set of WYSIWYG tools for creating and editing XSLT data views, including support for styles, sorting, filtering, grouping, and conditionally formatting data. Users can connect multiple data sources and use the results of one database query to filter the data supplied by an XML Web service. All this work can be saved into a Web package, a new feature in FrontPage 2003. FrontPage will ship with a couple of prebuilt Web packages, including a blog solution.

FrontPage 2003 is loaded with design and coding features including Layout Tables to achieve pixel-precise layouts, Dynamic Web templates to give users control of their site from one location, greater compatibility with widely used graphics and applications, and browser and resolution reconciliation to target specific browsers and screen sizes.

FrontPage 2003 offers powerful coding tools, such as the new Split Screen view, which allows designers to see the code and the design view simultaneously; the Quick Tag Selector and Quick Tag Editor, which help developers select, edit, and manipulate tags; Advanced Find and Replace, which uses complex rules to search the code sitewide at even the tag and attribute level; Behaviors, which provide built-in scripting; and Microsoft IntelliSense technology, one of many coding features employing the Visual Studio development system coding engine.

Beta 2 of Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003 is available as part of the Microsoft Office System. Customers can learn more and sign up to receive the beta at http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/frontpage/. The final release will be out in summer 2003; pricing will be announced at that time.