FrontPage 2002 lets you standardize HTML code through its Page Options dialog. Open the HTML document in FrontPage, select Tools Page Options, click the HTML Source tab, and examine the choices available. By default, FrontPage preserves the existing HTML code, even if it contains errors and even when you subsequently edit the document and use your own formatting style. But that's only one of several options.

If you're satisfied with the HTML on the open page and you want FrontPage to ensure the same code styles on all new content on your Web site, click the button labeled Base on current page. Using this feature in conjunction with the radio button Preserve existing HTML ensures that older content will remain intact, with only new content affected by the new coding style.

The other options work in conjunction with the radio button Reformat using the rules below. Using this button with the array of options in the Formatting section of the dialog lets you change all existing HTML code on your site and simultaneously force FrontPage to check for and change new coding styles that do not meet your specifications. You can specify, for example, that all tag and attribute names must appear in lowercase, or indicate whether to allow authors to insert line breaks inside tags when working in FrontPage's HTML view (by default, they cannot).

The dialog's greatest flexibility lies in its tag-specific customizability. The HTML tags are listed in a scrollable pane, and when you select one, the options to the right of the pane change to reflect the possibilities available for that specific tag or container. Using the BODY container as an example: You can choose to omit the start tag, the end tag, or both, while the only choice for the heading containers (H1, H2, and so on) and the script container, which requires both tags in order to work properly, is to indent the contents of each container in : the HTML view.

Indenting the contents does not alter the operation of the HTML code, because HTML ignores spaces. Instead, indenting makes the code easier to read in FrontPage's HTML view. As a further aid, the dialog lets you surround tags and containers with white space, in the form of non-HTML line breaks. You can specify how much white space you wish to add for each tag or container.

This dialog is especially useful when you are reformatting all your HTML documentation to meet the standards of XHTML. Unlike HTML, which is case-agnostic, XHTML requires that tags appear in lowercase. Using FrontPage's dialog, you can ensure that all your documents adhere to this requirement.