[Sigia-l] When Should a Manual be Web-based?

Thu Feb 27 05:40:36 EST 2003

> > From: sigia-l-admin at asis.org [mailto:sigia-l-admin at asis.org]On
> > Behalf Of Jon Hanna
> >
> > > Since Word can generate HTML for a document, there is little
> > > reason to publish in Word format.
> >
> > If you'd call that HTML...
>
> Yes, I do.
>
> What else do you call tags like <html></html>, <head></head>, and
> <style></style>? Word-generated-therefore-non-HTML?

Well it could be HTML. But by that criteria so could "<head></html><head>".
You can't make up the rules of HTML as you go along and expect other people
to understand what the hell you are doing.

What word produces "looks" like HTML, for about 2 seconds. It looks close
enough to HTML that *some* user agents will treat it like HTML and render,
parse, index (or whatever the UA is meant to do) at least some of it. This
is because user agents designed for use by non-technical users are meant to
fall-back when they encounter an obvious bug and plough on through as best
they can. That said there are tools for processing HTML that will just go
"WTF?".

To output random gibberish that is convenient at the time to output whether
to make it easier for your editor to re-parse (which some of the gibberish
clearly is) or whether it is out of laziness or a deliberate attempt to
break on other company's software (which is the only possible explanation
for a lot of the other gibberish) isn't generating HTML.