ms word vs html ?

Eric Eisenhart eric at eisenhart.com
Mon Sep 30 23:05:51 PDT 2002


On Mon, Sep 30, 2002 at 08:17:59PM -0700, augie 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 depends a lot on your final output requirements, but for something like
that you should very seriously consider docbook; it's an XML-based format
that can be rendered to HTML, RTF, PS, PDF and I think other formats, as
well.  I think there's even a conversion to TeX or LaTeX.  There's a bunch
of "docbook" packages that are part of Debian, and also I believe for
RedHat; commonly used for documenting open-source projects.

For that matter, a certain (broad) subset of LaTeX can be converted to (very
nice) printed output or to HTML output.  "tex4ht".  If you happen to be
using Debian, "apt-get install tex4ht".

> >all this seems unnecessary since an html format can do everything
> >(and
> >more) that the word format can do. an html document can be printed
> >from a browser just like a word document is from word.

HTML doesn't print as nicely as something intended for print, like LaTeX,
docbook or (ugh) Word.

> >plus an html document is more advantageous than a word document
> >because it is accessible to everyone from anywhere on the network. a
> >word document is not.

If you use CVS, html can be managed through CVS quite nicely with proper
merges and whatnot; Word docs have to be treated as non-mergeable binaries.

DocBook, being an XML format, should also have this revision-controllable
aspect.  (I haven't tested this, though; I have quite thoroughly tested
managing HTML through CVS, however)

> >furthermore, and this is where i go off on my opensource tangent,
> >because HTML is an open standard its contents will always be able to
> >be viewed and changed at any time in the future. the same cannot be
> >said for MS word format. the word format changes with each new
> >release
> >of word, so that in the future your new version of word may not be
> >able to understand your old document, and you could possibly lose all
> >your data entirely.

Word is not a portable format.  You'll also run into problems if you use a
font that's not present on the computer it's being sent to, or even if
there's simply different printer settings or different margin settings. 
Sometimes even if the printer settings and margins appear the same but
there's a slightly different version of the printer driver.
-- 
Eric Eisenhart                                  eric-dot-sig at eisenhart.com
Perl, SQL, Linux and Web            ^           IRC: Freiheit at openprojects
Coder, Sysadmin and geek           /e\                AIM: falsch freiheit
http://eric.eisenhart.com/         ---                       ICQ: 48217244
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