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Subject:Re: Word > clean HTML / SGML > HTML From:Beth Mason <beth -dot- mason -at- MANTECH -dot- COM> Date:Tue, 27 Jul 1999 09:21:02 -0400
>>> John Cornellier <cornelli -at- CLAMART -dot- SRPC -dot- SLB -dot- COM> 07/26 3:32 AM >>>
<snip>
I was pleasantly amazed to discover that if you load a
well-formed HTML file in Word 97, then edit, Word hardly messes it up at
all (as compared to Word's .doc -> .htm export), apart from the following:
* on certain style tags (e.g. address) it applies inline formating (others
it leaves alone)
* its behaviour with ASCII values >127 is erratic.
* doesn't seem to retrieve CSS data
* redefines table widths pixel values to percentages
<snip>
John,
I worked on some web pages in Word 97, and I became so frustrated with it, I eventually finished up the whole project in a plain text editor. In addition to the things you mention above, Word screws up ordered (numbered) lists, especially if you have unordered (bulleted) lists embedded in them. It also allows you to indent things, and then doesn't carry over the indenting correctly.
At first, I tried fixing the weird things in a text editor, then continuing to work in Word. But as soon as I opened up the HTML in Word again and saved--boom, it screwed up everything again that I had just fixed.
The biggest frustration I experienced using Word to edit HTML was that it was *not* WYSIWYG. Everytime I wanted to see what it *really* looked like, I had to save in Word (a long and torturous process for anything but a tiny page--it took literally 2 or 3 minutes on my Pentium 166, 32MG RAM machine to save some files) and open the file in my browser.
I know this isn't exactly what you asked, but I thought I'd share my experience. Personally, I will *never* work with HTML in Word 97 again. Of course, I hear Office 2000 is better, but I'll believe it when I see it...
