4.2 Web Publishing

In many ways publishing Web documents is both easier and more difficult when using Linux. In Linux, you have more ways to actually edit the documents, and less ways to interact with FrontPage-style servers used by the corporate network. In essence, there is no real equivalent to FrontPage in Linux, but there are some extremely nice tools that attempt to mimic this behavior.

We should point out the several advantages to using FrontPage that are not available when using many of the Linux tools. While most of these have alternatives, FrontPage and these alternatives do not work well together.

• CVS, RCS, and SCCS are alternatives to FrontPage's check-out/in facility, but these cannot be used with FrontPage directly without a third-party plug-in.

• Documents can be published to a FrontPage server even when the folder is not shared or mounted to the Linux box.

• FrontPage plug-ins provide enhanced tools.

Taking these differences into consideration is a major concern for the administrator. If you want to edit documents on a Linux system and you cannot run FrontPage itself, there is no way to publish documents without mapping or mounting the FrontPage repository directly to the machine. You can download and save Web pages using many tools, but publication, FrontPage's major ability, is NOT available without direct access to the share.

Does your IT administrator want to grant this functionality? Be aware that once it is granted, the check-in/out functionality of FrontPage can be completely bypassed. The alternative is to use...