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

[Simon Wistow]

On Wed, Feb 26, 2003 at 11:11:40AM -0000, Jon Hanna said:
> Since Word can
> > generate HTML for a document, there is little reason to publish in
> > Word format.
> 
> If you'd call that HTML...

Whilst Word's HTML is particularly crufty the latest version of their
export filter is much better and you can clean it up using the w3c's
htmltidy program

http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/tidy/

especially using the word-2000 and clean flags

"word-2000: bool
    If set to yes, Tidy will go to great pains to strip out all the
surplus stuff Microsoft Word 2000 inserts when you save Word documents
as "Web pages". The default is no. Note that Tidy doesn't yet know what
to do with VML markup from Word, but in future I hope to be able to map
VML to SVG.

Microsoft has developed its own optional filter for exporting to HTML,
and the 2.0 version is much improved. You can download the filter free
from the Microsoft Office Update site.


clean: bool
	If set to yes, causes Tidy to strip out surplus presentational tags and
attributes replacing them by style rules and structural markup as
appropriate. It works well on the html saved from Microsoft Office'97.
The default is no."


or demoroniser

http://www.fourmilab.ch/webtools/demoroniser/

which is another approach.


The alternative would be to store the documents in some simple format
(anything from plain text to XML, SGML or even POD or WikiFormat) and
then generate PDF, PS, RTF, HTML, Whatever versions.


Sorry, this post probably isn't very IA-ish but if you are going to use
Word produced HTML then those programs may help.

Simon

-- 
the test for truth is still quicker than the addition