>Well, I'll reduce the volume on the buzzer. True, you could create an HTML page without connecting to a web server, but that would be like cracking a walnut with Tim Taylor's favorite 30 pound sledge! I guess if you like VIDs syntax coloring it would be useful, but that's about it. In order to use any of VID's management tools or to create ASP pages you have to be connected to a web server and in order to connect, VID requires the FP extensions.

Visual Interdev and FrontPage use the same server extensions. As Gary pointed out, they are not entirely required but it depends on what you are doing. Some of the things the extensions give you are:

Publishing tool (keeps track of changed files and rights for publishing)
Bot's for include files and certain form validation and submission
Site Navigation
Themes

I used to rely on FrontPage more than I do now. I despise the way it publishes to a site, very slow compared to pure FTP. I also hate the navigation stuff that FrontPage puts in. The bots are cool for adding things like a standard header or footer or some text/image to be shown for a limited amout of time. But in reality these things can be handled programmitically as well. Themes are another "cool" idea I've gotten away from. Cascading Style Sheets give you a lot more control and fail gracefully if at all (pre 3.0 browsers don't support it, 4.x browsers have mixed support).

Gary, pardon my lack of experience with VI, but are you sure you need FP extensions to support data connectivity? I would think that if you had your own custom ISAPI filters or COM objects properly loaded on the server that data connectivity would work. I'm not trying to argue a point for or against installing FP exentions on the server, nor am I trying to shoot down your statement, I'm just curious.