Pages produced with Microsoft's Frontpage are crap, but is FP at fault or FP users for using this tool?
I question how much FP users are at fault. How are most people supposed to judge the quality of FP? My guess is that it'll be what appears in their browser. This leads to a more general question. How are most people supposed to judge what appears in their browser?
Some of us go beyond just looking at what is displayed. I often look at the source when there's a problem with what is displayed in a browser. So I judge FP by what I see in the HTML source. I judge FP users by what I know about FP and users in general, which is that not everyone understands the full technical details of a task and that this will sometimes lead to trouble - like when a tool doesn't do enough to hide those technical details or when it does, but it gets the details it hides wrong. FP sounds like the latter case.
A good shouldn't make the user struggle to make it do the right thing. Default behaviour should be to do something sensible and nothing unexpected. Read the Software Tools books to see what I mean. Then play with a tool like PKZIP (or WinZip) and see how well it can be done.
Very little MS software seems to reflect this. Apart from their development tools, which are of course create by and for programmers. Perhaps it's the marketing people who fail to appreciate the value of good tool design? It's plausible.
So, we have a tool that does the wrong thing and users that can't appreciate this and don't even expect to appreciate such things. I've seen people, and I'm sure I'm not alone, mistake HTML for a page description language. They may make many other errors, too. However, they needn't be stupid. Ignorance is sufficient. Alas, one of the problems with ignorance is how little it is recognised.
Hence my concern with the design of tools in general. Hence my distinction between tools created by programmers for programmers, and tools created by programmers for non-programmers.
Summary: Nobody has to pass a test before becoming a web designer. Thus, few of us know what we need to know in order to do web design. Few people even know low little they know. No tool can know enough, but at least tools can be designed to do as little harm as possible.
Is FP such a tool? I doubt it.