Re: Word 2004 as an HTML editor

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Hi Phillip:

OK, just to add to the amusement, I can think of a few people who have been
deeply, deeply humiliated by that control :-)

It means "Fix" in the sense of "Destroy the document so it will never come
back again."

Microsoft Word doesn't write "HTML" and they should have claimed that it
did. It writes XHTML -- HTML enhanced with XML. "Marketing" thought we
were all too stupid to understand "XHTML", so they called it "HTML". It's
not. It never was. The XML written by Word 2007 is remarkably clean these
days: but it's NOT HTML and it never was :-)

The reason is simple: Microsoft wanted users to be able to save a document
as a "Web Page", then re-open the result and get a document back. And
that's what Word does.

Word is capable of far, far more complex formatting than HTML can describe.
Word's XHTML will fully describe a Word document (including things such as
headers, footers, pages, and page numbering) which do not exist in HTML.

However, all modern browsers can display Word's XHTML and get the document
to look exactly like it did in Word. They ignore the headers and footers
and whatever. And if you re-open the web page in Word, you get your
document back, and you can re-save it back as a Word document and keep your
tracked changes or table of contents or whatever.

However: Press the magic "Fix" button in Adobe, and she's pooched. Utterly
cactus. Irretrievably destroyed. If you want to bring the result of that
back into Word, you will get an opportunity to greatly improve your typing
skills ...

I always say: Word writes very rich code that fully describes a Word
document. If you do not like the code, don't look -- it was never designed
to be human-readable anyway.

But for John's application, I think Word's approach is ideal. John doesn't
WANT to win some boring debate about deprecated attributes in HTML. He
wants his documents on the web. Word will do that, just by "Save As". John
doesn't know HTML, and doesn't have time to learn it: he will never look at
the code, and neither will his readers. They will all see John's web pages
looking exactly like they did to John in Word.

John will save literally months of his time, and many dollars. His readers
will get their content. And nearly everyone is happy.

When I first started saving Word XHTML to the Word website, people used to
send me angry emails frothing at the mouth over "the quality of the HTML".
I made each of them the same offer: YOU re-code the page to look exactly the
same in 'correct' HTML and I will publish it. None of them ever sent me a
corrected page: not one! And I know why: the time, effort, and knowledge it
takes to beat Word at this game without losing any information is very
considerable. Which is why I don't do it.

To write a moderately complex web page by hand in BBEDIT will take someone
who knows HTML well most of a working day. I use Word to publish websites
at the rate of about 800 pages an hour. See the difference?

Yes, these days I do tend to use Expression Web to fiddle with the result.
But: surprisingly little, and not every time. I have other things to do
with my life :-)

Cheers


On 31/08/08 4:37 AM, in article OUrj4OtCJHA.4804@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx,
"Phillip Jones" <pjones1@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I'll tell you something that will may you grin anyway.

I own and used until recently Studio 8 (which is Dreamweaver, Flash,
Contribute 8)

In Dreamweaver in the tools menu there is actually a command
*Fix Microsoft HTML*

In other words if someone create an HTML page using MS Word2004 it will
read and strip all the MS Junk and Change to real HTML code. IT gets it
right about 90&% of the time.

Bible John wrote:
Does that assume one is an expert at HTML? Because I am not.


--

Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Nhulunbuy, NT, Australia. mailto:john@xxxxxxxxxxx

.

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