ms word vs html ?

[Karsten M. Self]

on Mon, Sep 30, 2002, troy (fryman at sonic.net) wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 30, 2002 at 08:17:59PM, augie the opensource zealot wrote:
> > 
> > i am trying to convice one of my profesors that we should not use both
> > ms word and html to document a project, and in fact we should not use
> > ms word at all.

<...>

> > >it seems like an unnecessary duplication of effort to document
> > >something in both word, and html. chapter committees will have to
> > >produce their work in both formats instead of just one, and the two
> > >seperate editors will have to coordinate their work so that they are
> > >in sync with eachother.
> 
> Really, they'd just do File->Save As->html (Unless it was a gov't or
> HP, in which case they'd have bi-weekly meetings to sync up)

This isn't necessarially true.  It depends on the version of Word, and
the complexity of the document.

In a prior life, I was one of the folks responsible for documenting a
free software e-commerce product.  After a change in editorial staff,
the manager's preferred tool become MS Word, from MS Office 2K.  I was
working with DocBook via emacs, and exporting HTML.  Tagging the
existing (HTML) docs, about 80-90 pages each, took a couple of hours,
after which generating new content was trivial.

Went to work on the manager's HTML export.  It blew up both Netscape and
Mozilla.  Ran the docs through W3C's 'tidy' utility to clean up the
HMTL.  One document finally validated (after a bunch of hand-edits to
fix errors).  The other blew up _tidy_ itself.  The HTML was _so_
nonstandard it blew up the HTML validator.  I ended up rendering the
document via Lynx and re-tagging it by hand.  In both cases, the tidied
HTML was ~30% the size of the original MS Word generated document.

Note that Microsoft eventually issued a fix which addressed this issue
somewhat.  The emitted HTML was still bletcherous, but tidy could cope
with it.

In related news, the company ultimately failed.

Peace.

-- 
Karsten M. Self <kmself at ix.netcom.com>        http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
 What Part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
   Support the EFF, they support you:  http://www.eff.org/
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