> I gave the Internet Assistant with MS Word 6.0.1 (Mac) a test run.
The Internet Assistant generates fairly poor HTML. Not the worst I've
seen, though.
> I loaded hosaphone-faq.html in Word and confirmed it was an HTML file.
> At first the translation appeared to be pretty normal. But then I
> noticed some formatting that was slightly off. The white space wasn't
> always there.
Eh? What do you mean by 'white space'? HTML doesn't consider whitespace,
and extra spaces in HTML are pretty much ignored.
> changed the formatting.
> A line that was indented with 4 hard spaces
> was deleted while the remaining text in that section was untouched.
Ouch. That's far worse than the expected 'turn 4 hard spaces into a single
space', or the optimal 'Hmmmm. Maybe he's got the spaces here for a
reason. I'll just <PRE></PRE> this line' which would cause millions of
auto-generated HTML documents worldwide to have the first line of every
paragraph rendered preformatted, since there ARE SO MANY PEOPLE OUT THERE
WHO DON'T UNDERSTAND TAB STOPS, NEVER MIND PARAGRAPH STYLES! (If any of
you are wondering what styles are - oh, I hope not - please go read a
recent book on wordprocessing. Or your manual.)
HTML 2.0 does not support indentation as such (blank lines are infinitely
preferable in any case), but deleting text is sufficient cause to trash
internet assistant, IMO.
Why were you using hard spaces for indentation? Normal spaces after
a return should be acceptable; it sounds to me like you're not familiar
with the capabilities of your wordprocessor in the way you're generating
a plain-ASCII FAQ from Word. I'd use tab stops and then replace the
tabs with the appropriate number of spaces afterwards when I reformat
to 75 columns.
IMO, using Word to generate an ASCII FAQ is overkill. I gave up on that
after I realised how many invisible characters Word was inserting in my
ascii FAQ that didn't show up on the Mac.
I gave up on Internet Assistant for entirely different reasons than space
formatting; IA is barely acceptable if the people passing you the word
documents understand correct use of styles, but if they don't (and so many
don't) you may as well mark up by hand, as it's the only way you'll get
correct <Hn> tags in.
> Then opened it from Netscape and
> it caused formatting problems too. I looked at the HTML that Word
> wrote out and they placed their own credits in there:
>
> <META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="Internet Assistant for Microsoft Word 2.0">
> </HEAD>
That, at least, is a very reasonable thing to do. Fair warning and all
that. I wouldn't complain about this, since it's an example of good use of
the META tags that you should be using to flag the contents, expiry dates,
authorship etc of your documents.
> ClarisWorks has HTML support, but you aren't editing exactly what you
> will see either. I have the sinking feeling that the best way for a
> Mac user to handle the writing of an FAQ is to manually put it into
> HTML and view it often by loading it into Netscape to see how it will
> look.
That's the best way to do HTML, period, although I'd substitute {Netscape,
Lynx, Mosaic, Explorer and a couple of other browsers} for {Netscape}, at
least until I had a good feel for what I could get away with. (Frames
fallthrough to non-frame browsers and tables in lynx and mosaic spring to
mind.)
I'd go for automating start and end tags as much as possible using
something like BBEdit's convenient HTML menu, and I'd want something to
build tables for me. I'd avoid fully 'automatic' HTML generators, since
their HTML just isn't up to scratch.
L.
and I'd still end up post-processing the output with scripts to get it right.
Lloyd Wood, CSER Networks Group, University of Surrey, +44 1483 300800 x3435
<URL:http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/>netboy<L.Wood@surrey.ac.uk>
[
Usenet Hypertext FAQ Archive |
Search Mail Archive |
Authors |
Usenet
]
[
1993 |
1994 |
1995 |
1996 |
1997
]
© Copyright The Landfield Group, 1997
All rights reserved