Posted by Joris Gillis on 10/21/55 11:26

Hi,

Tempore 12:19:53, die Sunday 11 September 2005 AD, hinc in foribus {microsoft.public.word.vba.general,microsoft.public.word.docmanagement,alt.html,comp.text.xml} scripsit Alan J. Flavell <flavell@ph.gla.ac.uk>:

>> Word XP and upwards stores its documents in XML format doesn't it?
>
> So what? XML is only a format for defining markup. If the markup
> doesn't do anything meaningful (specifically - if it only creates a
> visual result on a printed page, without having any significant
> structure) then it's not going to turn into effective HTML: it'd just
> be the usual garbage in / garbage out that we're accustomed to with
> Word conversions to soi-disant "web" format.
>
>> You could probably write your own XSLT to turn in into HTML fairly
>> easily.
>
> There seems to be some kind of conceptual disconnect here. Most Word
> documents (in my experience) simply don't contain the necessary
> structure for useful conversion to HTML: they've been created as a
> purely visual construction for printing onto paper. It's irrelevant
> what underlying technology you use (RTF, XML, SGML, whatever) - the
> problem is that the source material simply does not represent the
> needed structures, *because the document authors do not put it there*.
>
> You might as well try to convert cheese into fresh cream: both are
> fine milk products, it's true, but instead of trying to convert the
> one into the other, you'd do better to produce them both starting from
> fresh milk. And the kind of "fresh milk" that's needed here is
> logically structured text markup. Not visual formatting. Until the
> authors of Word documents can grasp that, the prospects for conversion
> of Word to web formats are poor, IMHO.

I warmheartedly applaud your brilliant analysis. You stated your point very clearly.

It's depressing to see what a tiny percentage of people realize (or bother with) the importance of structural markup.

The future does not look bright. I have seen so called 'IT-classes' where they make innocent people believe they are IT-experts when they can change the background color of characters typed in Word...

regards,
--
Joris Gillis (http://users.telenet.be/root-jg/me.html)
Spread the wiki (http://www.wikipedia.org)

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