Murray,
NOF stores the pages in an internal database format. Basically, it's
a homegrown format to handle the needs of NOF. During the publish process,
NOF translates the layouts into HTML. NOF needs to store it's pages in this
database in order to get the great layout features it does. NOF was the
first product on the market that really let developers position items on a
page like they would with a graphics application (and cost about $600 too).
Unfortunately for NOF it has been fairly limited by this database format.
Nice concept, but it doesn't work well in a large environment where multiple
people really need to work at it since it's basically all in one file
(unless you want to buy into Team Fusion).
Hope this helps,
Mark Fitzpatrick
Microsoft MVP - FrontPage