[ATM] How to make clean(er) html for web pages in MS Word

[Mark Holm <mdholm@telerama.com>]

Ulhas Deshpande wrote:

> 
> Yes, as pointed out by Mark the page is created with MS word.

Since a lot of people (including many atm's) want to use MS Word to
create web pages, I will post this to the list and not just to Ulhas.

As discussed in an earlier message, MS Word, left to it's defaults, puts
a lot of non standard code into web pages (html).  Browsers other than
MW Internet Explorer often do not render these files properly.  A way
that may help is to change some settings in MS Word.

Quoting from the Word 2003 help file:

On the Tools menu, click Options, and then click the General tab.
Click Web Options, and then click the Browsers tab.
Select the Disable features not supported by these browsers check box.
In the People who view this Web page will be using box, choose your browser.

Select the option that includes MS Internet Explorer 4.0 and Netscape
Navitgator 4.0 or later.  This probably will not give complete standards
compliance, but will probably be good enough for most browsers to render
your pages properly.

On that same options screen, CSS is OK.  Most browsers now support it.
If you really want to be back compatible though, turn it off.
Likewise,PNG is OK in most recent browsers, but I find that PNG image
files are usually larger than equivalent JPG files.  You probably want
to stay away from VML.  That is asking for more non standard MS stuff.


Then, and this is important, when you save the file, use the "Save As"
menu item and save it as "Web Page Filtered" html.

The difference between filtered and unfiltered is night and day.
unfiltered contains all sorts of extra code.  It is there to support
features of MS Word that simply do not exist in standard HTML.  When you
post web pages to the web, you can not assume everybody uses MSIE.  The
"filtered" option should make code that works properly in most browsers.

The "filtered" option will also save you storage space and save
everybody download bandwidth.  A simple page with one line of text and
one image came out to 4290 bytes unfiltered, but only 760 bytes filtered
(not counting the image file size in both cases.)

-- 
Mark Holm
mdholm@telerama.com

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