Using MSWord

Buckshot · 01-14-2003, 04:31 PM

I'm pretty new to all of this "stuff." Somewhere in the tutorials I ran across something that said if you used wordpad or word to save your htm files, you would encounter problems caused by the extra formatting generated.
Before I knew about this, I had written an article in Word for my site (which, btw, I haven't as yet ftp'd because of this potential problem). What sort of problems might this cause? So far viewing it in IE 5 it appears to look OK, but I'd like to head any problems "off at the pass," if I can. If the potential problems are nasty, are there any suggestions as to quick fixes? I don't mind having to re-type the article, it's just that I only type at about 75 words per weekend, and I'd like to get up and running this year;-)

*Wassercrats* · 01-14-2003, 06:05 PM

I only had that problem once, and I wasn't the one who fixed it, but I think the "Dos/Unix conversion" button in CNC can fix those problems. But I've used MS Word to edit HTML documents and then pasted them to CNC with no problems.

Buckshot · 01-14-2003, 06:24 PM

Thanks Wassercrats, I was hoping that was the answer. Otherwise, I've got a lot of work that I'd have to convert somehow. We'll see. thanks again

MichaelC · 01-14-2003, 06:30 PM

Word adds a pile of proprietary tags to HTML documents. At best, they're an unneccessary waste of bandwidth, and at worst, hey wreak havoc with cross-browser compatibility (only IE can read them). In a word, non-compliant.

There may be some shareware/freeware utilities that will strip out all the proprietary formatting. Dreamweaver has a "Clean up Word HTML" function.

MC

*Andilinks* · 01-15-2003, 03:43 PM

You could try this:

http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/tidy/

*kitchin* · 01-16-2003, 12:22 AM

If you save you file as plain text, .txt, and then change the extension to .htm when you upload it, it will display fine. But you might want to add a few line breaks with <br>.

Somehow my html philosophy is not very popular on the Phoneix/Mozilla forums, where strict w3c adherence and use of css is valued above convenience!

Seriously, I think the advice your read about Wordpad and Word might have concerned those programs' tendency to save files in rich text or word format instead of plain text. A separate problem people are discussing here is Word's ability to convert your document into html, in a usually quite messy fashion.

If you upload your file as I described at the start of this post, you will see right away if it is plain text or not.

*Andilinks* · 01-16-2003, 04:38 AM

Quote:

A separate problem people are discussing here is Word's ability to convert your document into html...

Yes, that is precisely what I thought this discussion was about.

If getting just the text posted on the site is more important than the formatting (and it usually is) then Kitchin is absolutly right. In fact a very good way to learn HTML is to begin with an unformatted text file and slowly add HTML tags to modify the formatting. This will give you a very good feel for what the tags actually do, something you may never know by using Word's "Save as..." or using FrontPage or other wysiwyg editors.

I recently validated my HTML pages--after 11 months of non-compliance online. Yes, content is more important than compliance.

Andi