A newspaper’s front page says a lot about its attitude towards the news. Even if the traditional format difference between broadsheet and compact tabloid newspapers is disappearing, one can still distinguish a serious newspaper from a more trivial one by its masthead, eye-catching pictures and bold typeface. A good front page will also ‘tease’ stories that appear on other pages of the same edition.
Front-page also refers to a WYSIWYG HTML editor from Microsoft that was part of its Office suite of software products until it was discontinued in 2006. The product’s name is an abbreviation of “Microsoft FrontPage”. FrontPage used a set of server-side extensions (called FrontPage Server Extensions or FPSE) for remote web content and publishing. FPSE was a proprietary technology and it had several security problems over the years.
The FrontPage Editor included features such as Intellisense (a form of autocompletion) for tags and properties that the user was typing in Code View. It also offered a Split View option that allowed the user to edit in Design View and preview in Code View simultaneously. Other useful features were Quick Tag Editor and Code Snippets.
The New York Times has a wonderful online collection of front-pages from around the world. This is an excellent resource for classroom activities and to study how different newspapers handle the news. For example, a famine in Africa that kills a few million people will get much more prominence in a front-page than an interview with the actress who won an Oscar.