Part 1: Introduction to FrontPage and FrontPage Extensions.

FrontPage was Microsoft's answer to the lack at the time of a professional WYSIWYG web content creation and management program. But they didn't just stop there. They also wanted to solve the problem many non-technical people face with including simple forms, counters and such on their site. "Now Joe Consumer could have all the functionality that those geeky college folks do, without all the work of learning how to program in this archaic and complicated CGI thing."

People adopted this technology relatively fast because it did exactly what they wanted. Users began to demand that their ISPs load FrontPage extensions on their Unix web servers, and if they didn't they would go someplace that did. Many system administrators at the time wrote this technology off as too much of a security risk, claiming that there was no reason for the extensions to require root privileges and that the protocol was proprietary, etc.. But poor old Joe Consumer didn't understand what the big deal was. He just wanted his hit counter.

Now with more recent releases of the extensions, Microsoft and others claim that those security problems have been fixed. This is in part due to the additional checks that the fpexec program (a program like suexec) does to make sure that the environment that the FrontPage client is interacting with is safe.