Thursday, July 19, 2007

Microsoft Expression Web and CSS -is it all it's cracked up to be?

After a number of months of hearing how great Microsoft's latest web development environment is -Microsoft Expression Web- I thought I would install it in place of Dreamweaver on my new laptop. I was -until today- pretty impressed with some of it's features, how well it handles CSS within the IDE and had no reason to complain.

That was until today. As I write this, I'm sitting in our apartment in Croatia with the sun beating down on me, generally enjoying life. As it's incredibly hot outside around noon, I thought it would be a good idea to crack on with some work on the new The Site Doctor design -which I hope to have online shortly after I return. So I load up Microsoft Expression Web and the various pages of the new site and crack on.

I've already sorted the CSS for the site so there was no need to open any of the files or make alterations to them however I like to have them open so I can check class names and ids as I work. When I switched over at one point, I noticed that my nice, neat and tidy CSS file of around 190 lines was suddenly closer to 300. I couldn't work it out until I noticed that Microsoft Expression Web had separated out all my group declarations into separate declarations such i.e.:

a, a:link, a:visited, a:active{...}

a, a:link, a:visited, a:active{
text-underline: none;
}

Became:

a:active{...}

a:active{
text-underline: none;
}

a:visited{...}

a:visited{
text-underline: none;
}

a:link{...}

a:link{
text-underline: none;
}

a{...}

a{
text-underline: none;
}

Well done Microsoft, I thought you would have learnt your lesson after the fiasco that was Visual Studio 2003's HTML editing, what on earth were you thinking? I'm sure this is a simple setting I need to change (and I can understand why they've done it) but not having Internet access here there's no easy way of finding out (I've searched the help files) which means hours of careful CSS architecture have been completely trashed.

So, as soon as I realised, I spent about 20 minutes meticulously working through the bunch of CSS files open reversing the mess Microsoft had made of them and promptly closed them, safe in the knowledge Microsoft Expression Web can't mess with them again. Or so I thought.

A short while ago I needed to open one of the CSS files again to alter a few declarations and to my horror I found that the declarations had been ungrouped. I can't believe it, not content with simply altering the CSS files that are open, Microsoft Expression Web actually alters the CSS files on the FSO without you knowing.

If you're ever thinking about using Microsoft Expression Web for CSS development then don't expect your files to be neat and tidy, in my case I would say the files were increased in size by almost 5x which ok may be 1Kb --> 5Kb but if you're getting tens of thousands of hits a day, that's a serious bandwidth increase.

Not a happy bunny.

Microsoft Expression Web and CSS -is it all it's cracked up to be?

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Tags: CSS | Visual Studio | Windows | The Site Doctor | Web Development

Monday, July 23, 2007 7:37:53 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Tim-
I just looked into this problem. In this particular case, there is definitely an issue with the CSS code being exploded--although not representative of our CSS handling and features in general. This is clearly not desired behavior and will absolutely be fixed. The team here feels strongly that Expression Web be oriented toward supporting web standards and allowing authors to create efficient, maintainable code. This is one of the reasons why we've spent so much energy on the CSS features. I can't say when this fix will be rolled into a publically-available version. But, we will make it available as soon as we can.
Steve Guttman
Product Unit Manager
Expression Web

Steve Guttman

Monday, July 23, 2007 10:18:09 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Hi mausami,

You're welcome, I hope you haven't lost too much time with it -at least Microsoft are now aware of it so hopefully we'll have a fix soon.

Tim

Tim

Monday, July 23, 2007 10:18:45 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Hi Steve,

Wow thanks for the response! I can understand why you may need to do that I was just a tad shocked it wasn't loaded into i.e. a temporary copy of the file (especially as it alters the file even when closed!) but I'm pleased to know I've highlighted an issue you weren't aware of :)

Let me know when it's been fixed and I'll give Expression another go (with an open mind :))

Tim

Tim

Tuesday, July 24, 2007 12:56:05 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Thanks Simon, I used to have a similar tool but completely forgot about it. I gave your link a go but it doesn't appear to group the declarations, this one [1] however appears to :)

[1] http://www.cssoptimiser.com/optimize.php

Tim

Tim