PDC05: Expression Quartz
I’m really looking forward to using Quartz, one of the three Expression graphic design tools announced yesterday at the PDC. Quartz is the XHTML/CSS designer, and even the fact that Microsoft would release such a standards-based tool would have been unthinkable not long ago. I think at this stage though (with schema-checking in VS 2005 and the cross-browser Atlas project), it’s fair to say Microsoft is finally embracing web standards and cross-browser compatibility. Quartz provides a completely CSS and semantic markup based designer and uses external CSS stylesheets which are automatically updated when you change the properties of an item.
Most (all?) standards-based web developers are currently forced to use a text editor and constant alt-tabbing to a separate web browser to create their sites, and even though it’s possible to be quite productive this way, it can be pretty painful, and slow. With only a quick demo at the keynote it’s difficult to say how well this will turn out, but for more details check out the Quartz features page.