Sorry - I can see that I obviously had misunderstood the problem earlier. No, I doubt now that there’s any setting in FP that can change this behaviour - it’s obviously there for a good reason if you think about it. All HTML tags are obviously identified by surrounding <> characters and so it presumably makes any browser’s parsing engine more efficient if the only <> characters in the HTML code are those associated with HTML tags. (Which is not to say that the browser can’t cope with non-tag <> characters but I can see that it’s less than desirable to have them in the actual HTML code and hence why the default behaviour of good HTML editors might be to replace <> characters in the text content with their entity equivalents, as well as conforming to HTML guidelines for good cross-platform and cross-language performance by encouraging the use of entity equivalents where possible.)
But there still might be a way by which you can enter the <> characters in design view as literals, though I do wonder if that wouldn’t end up taking more time than a global search and replace of eg < by < once the page was finished, which only takes maybe 5 seconds each for < and for > to replace all the occurrences of each entity in one go.
Have been thinking about this one for a while for you. I’ve used FP for years to do .php pages so it shouldn’t be a problem - but for all that I can’t think of a solution for you.
You could try Expression Web. There is a v2 Beta out at present that you can try for free. It has some improvements over Fp and v1 that make php editing easier:
Strange - Can you let us know the following settings: (just a hunch) (Under tools - page editor options)
Default document format - mine is set to HTML, and that’s what it would be “out of the box”
Document type declaration - mine is set to XHMTL 1.0 Transitional
Secondary Schema - mines IE7
Was the Expression install done after uninstalling frontpage, a registry clean, and then install Expression?
Also, take a look at the following page:
In particular the comment under “Change settings in FrontPage 2003”:
Use ASP-like <% and %> tags instead of the <? php?> tags. This stops FrontPage from reformatting your PHP code.
Note As an alternative, you can use tags instead of <? php?> tags.
The page seems to indicate it could be a server setting in your php.ini file which is interesting…
