I appricate your answer.
Fact is DreamWeaver is capable of reading and understanding of and writing:
HTML 3.2, 4.0, 4.0.1 Transitional, 4.0.1 strict
XML all versions
Java all versions
Javascript all to and including current
PHP 3.0,4.0, 5.0
I suppose the problem is that XML , HTML in Word is intended for another
thing as opposed to website material.
John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh] wrote:
Hi Phillip:
My experience with DreamWeaver is very, very small. I use FrontPage
extensively (because I'm webmaster for
www.word.mvps.org, and it's built
with it). Oh, and I get it for free...
But I'll give you a "discussion" on "Fix" as it applies to Word HTML.
The whole subject of Markup Languages is very poorly understood by the
non-professional audience, and nearly all of them have completely missed the
point of what Microsoft was trying to do (and has succeeded in doing...)
To begin with, Word DOES NOT write HTML. It never did, and was never
designed to. Word writes XML and XHTML. When Microsoft first included the
XML converter in Office, the Marketing Department came to the conclusion
that all users were too stupid to understand XML, so they forced the
designers to call it "Web Page" and "HTML".
It's not, and it was never designed to be
The reason Microsoft chose to output markup language in XML is very simple:
HTML simply isn't powerful enough to describe a Word document.
The design goal was to express a Word document in language a browser can
read. The ultimate goal was to render that document so exactly that if you
printed from Word and printed from the browser, you would not be able to see
the difference. They wanted the user to be able to round-trip their
document onto the web, then back to a document on another computer. You
cannot DO that in HTML. It's not powerful enough.
Well, the reality is not quite that good, but it gets very close. If you
choose Save As from Word 2004 and check the default "Save entire file into
HTML" you will get an almost exact rendition of the Word document.
You will indeed have a lot of markup language in the file that most browsers
cannot interpret. That's not necessarily a bad thing. It's not against the
rules
The whole "point" of markup languages is that the file should
contain information "marked up" so the display device can pick and choose
how much of the code it wants to use. That's the way it's MEANT to work. A
teleprinter or a mobile phone may discard most of the markup and just print
the text. A typesetting machine will use it all and add some of its own...
If you want to remove the "rich encoding", when you do the Save As, check
the button that says "Save only display information". That will get you the
99 per cent fat-free version of the code. If you copy and paste, you will
get the "Full Fat" version, because Word can't tell when you copy what you
are going to paste into.
One thing you will notice is that the earlier versions of Word make very
liberal use of "SPAN" tags. That's because Microsoft knows that the vast
majority of Word users don't use Styles, they use direct formatting. Using
SPAN tags you can directly replicate the ransom-note formatting of the
average school project
Word 2003 and later are much more likely to
"coerce" direct formatting into styles, and thus to express the formatting
as attributes of the <p> tag.
If you do save in the "Lite" version, don't expect to be able to re-create
the Word document from the web page. The filter removes the complex
information needed to rebuild the document from the web page, so you have a
one-way trip.
The difference is like a 16-track studio recording compared to an MP3. The
MP3 is much smaller -- but only because it has removed as much sound as it
thinks you can get away with. If you have good ears (and I suspect you
have...) and you can still find someone with a high-end vinyl record player,
have a listen. Try to do it on a Deutsche Gramophon live recording, and
compare it with the CD of the same performance. If you know what you're
listening for, I bet you find that some of the magic is gone
Now let's discuss "Unnecessary" as applied to web coding. First off, who
says it's unnecessary? The web designer? The web coder? The reader?
And WHY would any of them decide that code is unnecessary? When I first
started web coding, a faaaaast connection ran at 2,400 bps and nobody could
afford 28.8
Then, you kept your code damned simple if you wanted your
readers to be able to access it at all.
These days, most if the material I use Word to encode is reference manuals
or Help Files that are being accessed at gigabit speeds. On a gigabit LAN,
even the "Full Fat" flavour of a Word document will get to the computer
faster than the computer can draw the screen.
The user simply can't detect the difference between a tightly hand-coded web
page using all the economy tricks and a full-featured page pasted from Word.
But the customer can!! Let's assume my customer is paying $1,000 a day for
casual web coding (that's about the going rate...) and his on-costs are
double the web coder's wages (and that's about normal) the customer is
spending $2,000 a day to have his material put on the web.
For that, I can give him more than a thousand pages saved straight out of
Word, or maybe 1 to 10 pages carefully crafted in DreamWeaver. About a buck
a page, or between $100 and $2,000 a page. You do the math...
Don't forget the time involved: I'm currently working for an ISP. We just
spent around $3.6 million to get maybe 50 pages produced by a web coding
company. It took about six months to get the result. We think we got good
value, and we'll use them again. These were intensely complex "dynamic
shopping cart" pages, with which we will make squillions, so the investment
of both time and effort was worth it. And each of those pages contains
several times as much code as Word produces
The projects I use Word for are technical manuals that update every few
months. One project I work on produces a new version of two 500-page-ish
manuals each month. They make it available to their customers world-wide as
HTML, which I fire straight out of Word in under a day. Yes, they could
save the manuals to PDF and produce them even quicker: but most customers
balk at downloading a 12-15 MB PDF, only to find it has very limited
cross-referencing, searching, and interlinking.
For that sort of job, Word is your weapon. It all comes down to the
business drivers you need to achieve. Word is the most amazing web page
sausage-machine. If you prefer Chateaubriand, call a professional chef and
his copy of DreamWeaver
Yes, I can do this straight out of Word to the web server. And I can do
almost all of it with Word 2004. Sadly, they left a few tricks out of Mac
Word that come in handy when you're doing this sort of thing. PC Word has a
tuneable output filter than enables you to determine with a high degree of
control which tags will be removed when you filter, scalable vector
graphics, and the ability to attach cascading style sheets. I expect these
abilities will arrive in the next version of Mac Word (together with much
better XML graphics handling).
My "encouragement" to Microsoft is "don't forget the Professional User!"
You do have some professional users of Microsoft Word. And you're more
likely to find them using a Macintosh than a PC.
Currently, the Bean Counters and their allies in the Marketing Department
have decreed that Microsoft Word be massively dumbed-down in the next
version. That's because they have gigabytes (literally) of research data
that prove that most Word users never get beyond the notion of a "glass
typewriter". So why spend the money on all these expensive powerful
features that "users" never use?
Well, they do on a Mac. Maybe they don't need all those bells and whistles
on the PC. But here, we do. Here, people who pay money for Mac Office do
so because they need it more powerful than the alternatives, not because
they want it simpler
Cheers
On 14/11/06 10:34 AM, in article (e-mail address removed),
John have you ever opened DreamWeaver and took it for a spin?
One of the things That is on one of the menus is "fix Microsoft HTML code"
I tried creating pages with word, I saved as HTML and opened it in a W3C
Standards compatible browser such a FireFox, Mozilla. You never seen the
like of strange colored tags inserted at strange places.
After I first bought Dreamweaver 7 I noticed this little item.
After detecting everything it dumped a bunch of necessary code and tags.
And the document then worked as it should.
IF you can make it work straight fro creation to upload. Your far
smarter that I think you are and I think you border genius now. ;-)
John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh] wrote:
Hi Daniel:
You may be surprised. I think you will get both sound, animation, and
video
in web pages from the next version of Word.
Dreamweaver is a great web editor for making single pages. Word is your
weapon when you need to make web pages at the rate of three or four
hundred
an hour, such as for large-scale reference publishing.
I have a workflow using Word that publishes a 560-page book as a website:
I
can do two a day including the TOC and navbars
Cheers
On 13/11/06 6:31 AM, in article
(e-mail address removed), "DanielWalters6"
Microsoft themselves are probably not going to be much more help.
If you can afford it (no disrespect) use Dreamweaver 8 - it's brill!
It's got everything you can do in word, with the added FTP uploading etc.
