Microsoft Expression Web

Microsoft Expression Web, code-named Quartz, is a WYSIWYG HTML editor and general web design program by Microsoft, replacing Microsoft FrontPage. It is part of the Expression Studio suite.

Expression Web is focused on the needs of professional Web designers seeking to build high-quality, standards-based Web sites for companies. It provides support for integrating XML, CSS 2.1, ASP.NET 2.0, XHTML, XSLT and JavaScript into sites. It requires the .NET Framework 2.0 to operate. Its sibling is Microsoft SharePoint Designer. Expression Web uses its own standards-based rendering engine, different from the browser-based FrontPage, which uses Internet Explorer's Trident engine. Microsoft claims that Expression Web's rendering engine currently provides the most accurate standards-compliant rendering on the market, especially CSS rendering.

On May 14, 2006, Microsoft released the first public preview version of Expression Web on their web site. On Sept 5, 2006, Microsoft released Beta 1. The major changes from CTP 1 are that nearly all of the old FrontPage bots and functions have been removed. On December 4, 2006 Microsoft released the final version, which can be found on the Expression Web homepage.