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Users will find that Expression Web offers strong support for cascading style sheets (CSS), even more so than Dreamweaver, something applauded by early testers. The CSS rendering engine lets designers instantly see how their creations will look, and users can easily move styles from individual pages to a central location.

Microsoft has also emphasized standards compliance with Expression Web, which will come as a relief to those familiar with FrontPage. You can ensure that your pages will render correctly across all major browsers, and create pages that work with all levels of HTML, XHTML, and CSS. You can even validate your pages, to be sure that they conform to current accessibility guidelines.

If you're using Microsoft SharePoint to create collaborative online spaces for teams or workgroups, you'll be interested in SharePoint Designer 2007 instead of Expression Web. SharePoint designer is also a new product that serves as a replacement for FrontPage, but one that's narrowly focused on people who work with SharePoint sites.

Expression Web offers tools for beginning site designers, to help them get started (something Dreamweaver has never bothered to do). Newbies will appreciate the included wizards and templates.

Not surprisingly, Expression Web run only on Windows PCs (using Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or Windows Vista). Even though the Expression is being created by Microsoft, we're surprised that someone would offer a line of tools to developers and not include Mac support. But Mac fans who are interested can always run Windows on their Intel-processor Macs. Also, the product works best with Microsoft-friendly platforms, like ASP.Net 2.0, and less well with outside ones, like Java Server Pages.

Pricing
Pricing is $299 for Expression Web. Some FrontPage users can qualify for a $99 upgrade.

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