Web Page

[benze]

I am trying to make a web page using Word. When I insert a movie it will not
show on the web page. Only shows as a picture. It works fine with Adobe Go
Live. I changed it to QuickTime as requested. Any suggestions?

 

[CyberTaz]

Hi benze-

Best suggestion - Don't use Word to design web pages. The 'feature' is a
marketing ploy that will blow up in your face if you rely on it for anything
other than the most simplistic of web content.

If you know how to use GoLive, stay with it.

Regards |:>)

 

[Theresa]

Please don't use Word to create web pages. It's going to bloat the
code, will not provide valid mark-up, and is not going to be very
robust anyway. If you are creating something where you're inserting
movies, then you need to go to the next level.

If you have GoLive, then use it instead. My husband and I prefer
Dreamweaver (he's a former GoLive user) because we're both web
developers, but I've been hearing some excellent things about the
current and upcoming versions of FrontPage.


--
Theresa Mesa
Mesa Design House
http://mesadesignhouse.com

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[Jim Gordon MVP]

Hi,

I tried several versions of Word and it appears that movies in documents
simply don't get saved when saved as a web page. This appears to be a
limitation of the design of Word.

PowerPoint does have the ability to save movies as part of a web page,
so if your document is amenable to presentation format then that's an
option for you.

Theresa mentions that it is possible to edit web pages in Word and via
other programs. You can use Word to save your document as a web page,
but it is a really poor HTML editor. Use one of the other programs
available. FrontPage is not available for the Mac (unless you have
virtual PC). Adobe GoLive and Macromedia Dreamweaver are both competent
editors but there is a very capable free program called NVU from
http://www.nvu.com/ that is likely all you need in addition to some
HTML programming skills.

-Jim

 

[Theresa]

Theresa mentions that it is possible to edit web pages in Word and via
other programs. You can use Word to save your document as a web page,
but it is a really poor HTML editor. Use one of the other programs
available. FrontPage is not available for the Mac (unless you have
virtual PC). Adobe GoLive and Macromedia Dreamweaver are both competent
editors but there is a very capable free program called NVU from
http://www.nvu.com/ that is likely all you need in addition to some
HTML programming skills.

-Jim

While it's possible to create web pages in Word, I said I don't
recommend it. I didn't say anything about editing web pages in Word.
<shudder>

Since HTML formatting is now being deprecated by the Worldwide Web
Consortium (known as the W3C), meaning that it will no longer be
supported by the browsers at some point, a person is going to need to
learn more than HTML, which should only be used for the bare bones
structure. Formatting is being done in Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).
Designers of all levels of ability should be using at least XHTML
Transitional, if not XHTML Strict, and they should be validating their
pages after they're done creating them. This is not much more difficult
than using HTML. Cascaading Style Sheets is another matter, but worth
the effort - it gives you a smaller page that is more search
engine-friendly, especially if you don't build a Flash-based or
frames-based site.

Most professional web developers use Dreamweaver, and the newest
versions of DW and GoLive have pretty robust support for CSS,
especially for people who don't know anything about it. The thing is,
all the sites that are built in nonvalid HTML right now will eventually
have to be completely rebuilt. Bummer.


--
Theresa Mesa
Mesa Design House
http://mesadesignhouse.com

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[Jim Gordon MVP]

Hi Theresa,

The good thing is that all this rebuilding can be done over a period of
many years. There's no need to rush.

Although there will always be a market for hand-coding and human reading
of web page code, there will also be a market for machine created and
machine readable code, too. Our original correspondent falls into the
second category - relying on tools to do all of the work. We can suggest
methods of hand coding, but I suspect that is beyond the capability and
interest of the person who posted the original item in this thread. I
may be wrong, of course, but I think most who have the capability to do
it manually would have just gone ahead and done it that way in the first
place.

To warm the heart of all XML & CSS enthusiasts, the next version of
Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint will use XML as the default file
format. If you want the inside track on this visit Brian's blog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/

XML enthusiasts will get a chuckle from this article from one of the
authors of XML:
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/03/24/XMLisOK

-Jim

 

[Theresa]

Hi Theresa,

The good thing is that all this rebuilding can be done over a period of
many years. There's no need to rush.

Although there will always be a market for hand-coding and human
reading of web page code, there will also be a market for machine
created and machine readable code, too. Our original correspondent
falls into the second category - relying on tools to do all of the
work. We can suggest methods of hand coding, but I suspect that is
beyond the capability and interest of the person who posted the
original item in this thread. I may be wrong, of course, but I think
most who have the capability to do it manually would have just gone
ahead and done it that way in the first place.

Most people can't tell the difference, and then they wonder why their
pages don't work on certain browsers. They wonder why their websites
and eCommerce sites perform so poorly in the search engine rankings,
regardless of their best efforts, even for their niche businesses which
should be performing well.

Most of the machine-generated code out there is crap. Most of the
templates out there are crap. Many of the tools out there are crap.
They're tables-based (search engine unfriendly) and/or frames-based
(ditto to the extreme), they don't validate, they're not even close to
accessible. Disabled people have money to spend too, and they also use
computers. The sites are replete with JavaScript (also not search
engine friendly).

The code can be readable by a machine, but as the search engine robots
crawl the site, they go away after a short time because all they're
reading is code, not content, which is what they're searching for. The
web is about visibility, right? Yet most of the machine-generated code
out there prevents visibility.

I use Dreamweaver to create sites. I use a lot of their WYSIWYG coding,
but I also do hand coding. As my web design teacher said, if you don't
know the code, then how can you fix something if it's broken?

And considering that Google has indexed over 8 billion web pages, there
will be a lot of sites not yet fixed, and a lot of money lost, when
deprecated code is finally no longer supported. Considering how GoLive,
FrontPage, and Dreamweaver are scrambling to support CSS, this will
happen sooner, not later.

I'm glad MS is building support for XML. I've heard good things about
IE7's standards compliance (since it handles the box model differently
than the other browsers). Again, another indicator that eliminated
suppport for HTML formatting is coming sooner than later.

8 billion+ pages. A lot of work for a subset of designers & developers
who know how to build standards-compliant pages.


--
Theresa Mesa
Mesa Design House
http://mesadesignhouse.com

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[JE McGimpsey]

8 billion+ pages. A lot of work for a subset of designers & developers
who know how to build standards-compliant pages.

Nah... 99%+ of those 8 billion pages will never be touched. Just like
99%+ of the web pages that existed in 1995 have not been updated.

There will be a bit of work to update the critical ones, but browsers
will be backward compatible for the forseeable future.

And using Word to develop web pages is not a bad strategy if you want to
slap up content in real time that doesn't need to be archived (which is
the vast majority of all pages). Even though it produces garbage code,
the end user will never care because their browser handles it. By the
time a new non-backward-compatible browser comes along, the content will
no longer be relevant.

For a persistent site, or one that may need to be in use for a long time
(or archived), using something like Dreamweaver is better. But
Dreamweaver has a relatively steep learning curve, and most businesses
can't afford to have in-house Dreamweaver experts. Even talking about
building "standards-compliant pages" is talking about obsolete
technology. Working with pages is much too labor-intensive.
Standards-compliant sites that use something like PHP/MySQL or ASPX to
generate pages on the fly are far more efficient - the designer
generates the page once, then the content manager can focus exclusively
on the content.