FP2000: How FrontPage 2000 Handles Unknown HTML Tags

This article describes how FrontPage 2000 handles Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) tags which it does not recognize.

When FrontPage encounters an unknown tag while attempting to draw the normal HTML pane of Page View, it cannot extend the logical HTML tree structure of the document to include the unknown tag because it has no way of discovering how the unknown tag fits HTML standards. Instead, the unknown tag is placed into the text stream of the article. By placing the tag into the text stream of the document, FrontPage ensures that the tag's position relative to the text around it will remain fixed. In addition, by using the HTML markup component to store the unknown tag internally, FrontPage delivers a minimal disruption of the line spacing in normal view when paragraph marks are turned off. The added HTML markup elements are only used for rendering the display of the document in the Normal tab of Page View. The HTML markup component syntax is not written out to the HTML code. Since the unknown tag is placed into the text stream of the document, whenever you instruct FrontPage to rewrite a portion of the document within the unknown tags, that portion of the document will be written according to the specifications for the enclosing HTML tags FrontPage which does recognize. HTML constructs that do not meet specifications for the tags which FrontPage recognizes will be corrected when FrontPage writes that portion of the document out, yet FrontPage will still preserve the unknown tags it encountered. A second class of tags is known and can be managed by FrontPage, however is not rendered in WYSIWYG mode in the normal pane.

All HTML tags that are listed in the HTML 4.0 specification as defined by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) within the BODY tag or its child elements of a Web page are recognized by FrontPage 2000.

The following HTML tags are not displayed in the Normal view of FrontPage 2000:

• BDO
• IFRAME
• ISINDEX
• LEGEND
• FIELDSET
• OPTGROUP
• NOSCRIPT

For more information about HTML 4.0 tags and their guidelines, please see the following URL: For more information about HTML in FrontPage 2000, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: