Followup: Moving Word documents into HTML?

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

A followup on my earlier posting concerning moving Word documents into HTML.
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--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca 

  3. WHEN THERE'S TOO MUCH HTML IN WORD
  Word 2000 is promoted as having full HTML compatibility but
  there are times when full HTML fidelity is a pain in the
  neck.

  When you copy some text from Word to an HTML editor like
  Frontpage, Word does its best to send with it exactly what
  you had in the document.  The same fonts, spacing - the
  works.

  Sometimes that's what you want - but often you just want
  the basic formatting (bold, italics etc) plus the raw text.
  What Word sends with the copied text is a bloated set of
  class settings, span statements and XML tag placements.

  Try copying a few paragraphs from Word to Frontpage then
  look in the HTML view - you'll see things like:

  "<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">&nbsp; </span>" - this is
  just for two or more spaces!

  'class="MsoBodyText"'  - this is the name of the original
  Word style with 'Mso' in the front of it.

  "<o:p> </o:p>"  -- apparently these are XML placeholders.
  They are everywhere in Word copied text but serve no useful
  purpose in most cases.

  '<span style="font-size:9.0pt;mso-bidi-font-family:
  'Courier New' color:black">'  - span statements like this
  bring across the exact character formatting in Word.

  All this extra code can severely bloat the size of a HTML
  page, making it slower to download and display.  Worse it
  can confuse the page editor if they don't realize the tags
  are there.

  Sadly there's no direct solution - Microsoft had its focus
  so directly at HTML compatibility that it ignored the more
  practical possibilities.  Thankfully you can identify most
  of the surplus Word stuff because of the liberal use of
  'Mso' in the tags.

  One solution is to use Paste Special and choose the 'Normal
  Paragraphs' option.  That will remove all formatting codes,
  including fundamental ones like bold and italics etc.  The
  same happens if you select text in FrontPage and choose
  Format | Remove Formatting; all the formatting is lost.

  You can go through manually and remove the excess.  Because
  Frontpage has such a basic replace function (compared to
  Word) that's a tedious process.

  The only direct solution we've found is expensive but
  effective.  Dreamweaver 3 from Macromedia
  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000040P1K/woodsoffiwatcwoo
  has a feature specifically designed to remove the HTML
  crud.