So I'm working away in Expression Web on a new page that has bunch of changes. I'm updating, saving and occasionally dump the file up to my Web server. Now an hour into it I decide I need to change the title, so I change it in the HTML save and a bit later upload the file to the server. So I'm changing the title, upload and then a bit later notice that the title is wrong.

Now, I think I'm getting senile so I'm stacking it up to operator error and I change it again save, upload. A little later I see the title changed yet again. Now I'm not sure whether I should just head on down straight to the senior center.

It turns out this is a really wacky bug in Expression Web which is caused by the upload operation of the page when the title has been changed in the active document. I change the <title></title> tag, save to disk and upload. Somewhere in the middle of the upload process the <title> tag is changed back to the original page title that I wiped out a half an hour ago, and the file is sent to the server with the wrong title as well as changing my local document's title.

How whacky is that?

Now if I save the document and close it - no problem. But if I save the document to disk but leave it open, then upload the file and then go back to the editor (and now the online file as well) the title is back to its original state.

The workaround there is to change the title, save, close, then re-open and then upload to the server.

This bug's been around forever maybe even dating back to FrontPage, but it still hasn't been fixed which seems odd - it seems that this should affect quite a few people and send them into a flying rage of frustration <g>...

This is with Office SP1 applied (or Expression SP1 - who can ever make sense of the freaking patch naming system Microsoft uses to identify which product is actually getting patched) - in any case it didn't want to install the Expression patch because it's already been installed. Grumble.

I like Expression Web overall for editing my existing hellish HTML I have in various nooks and crannies of my site, but there are just a bunch of quirky behaviors that are annoying as hell. For example, even if the HTML schema is set to XHTML the editor will not offer to create XHTML by autocompleting tags correctly (like typing <br and getting the trailing />). It'll flag it immediately but won't attempt to auto-fix it. Then there's the upload tool which works well, but keeps prompting even when you ask it to 'Yes to All'. And man do I wish I had an Upload option on the page instead of having to find the damn document in my Web site's tree (which for the files I'm dealing with here is huge).

<shrug>

Someday I can maybe dispense with tools like this but I still have mountains of horrible mid nineties HTML on my site that doesn't manage well by hand <g> and so I put up with Expression Web. As an editor it  works well enough though it's just around the edges that the love is missing.

Incidentally this is not a bug in Visual Studio's 'version' of the Expression Web Engine in VS 2008, but then again they don't have an upload feature there either <g>. I was having problems though getting Visual Studio to open my root Web - it kept crashing after about 2 minutes (regardless of whether files were open or not). <shrug> At this point I suppose I just as soon WOULD use Visual Studio rather than expression Web to edit HTML because the HTML source editor sure is easier to work with in Visual Studio.