Posted by Andy Dingley on 02/02/07 12:14

On 2 Feb, 10:55, "Tomba" <tomba at pobox dot com> wrote:

> I own one web page, hosted here:http://pubs.sdrt.org/
> The HTML was created in WORD 97 by an HMT SaveAs of the .DOC source.

Word? You're doomed! 8-)

> The webmaster now insists that all pages on his site pass the test

Tell him to bugger off. Validity is useful and a good thing to aim
at, but it's not something that should be mandated without also
offering a practical way to achieve it. Hey, it's steam railways --
one of the very worst fields of web design for having to work with the
Loud Confident and Wrong; semi-clued anoraks who know enough to be a
nuisance, not enough to be helpful. Cheer up, it could be IT lecturers
instead.

First of all you ought to find yourself a text editor (try TextPad for
starters) and learn some _minimal_ HTML coding. You can't achieve
useful validity with a purely WYSIWYG tool. Good book is "Head First
HTML with XHTMl & CSS", possibly Elizabeth Castro, but anything else
is likely to be more harm than good. You will need to work with the
code directly though (it's not as hard as people make out).

Secondly, try opening it with a recent version of Word and saving it
as "HTML Filtered" rather than "HTML". This isnt' valid, but it's
closer to it than Word ever managed previously.

You're lucky that your output came out of Word 97 and not a more
recent Word. Word '97 makes bad HTML, the more recent versions (with
the mso: namespacing) make stuff that deliberately bears little
relationship to HTML at all. Those are almost unworkable! Tidy will be
useful here -- usually it isn't.

The recently updated HTML validator extension for Firefox
http://users.skynet.be/mgueury/mozilla/
incorporates both validators and Tidy. Using Tidy's simple "Just fix
the damn thing" option produces a page that's little changed but is
valid (I've just tried it). That's enough for you.

If you want to do more, then learn some trivial CSS, delete all the
<font> tags, all the <p> tags inside the table and then apply a few
simple classes and CSS style rules to the colour-highlighted blocks.
Add the HTML 4.01 Strict doctype declaration to the top and you're
well sorted.

[Back to original message]