Microsoft Word has a bad reputation when it comes to web development, especially amongst those who consider themselves experts and look down with disdain on those who can’t decode the language of XHTML, PHP and content management systems. There are good reasons for this. The option to produce a web page using the “File > Save As > Web page” option produces HTML code which is bloated and non-standards compliant. Consider an earlier Brighthub article of mine “The post-PowerPoint era of presentation”. As a Word 2003 file, it contains 2816 characters, excluding blanks. As an HTML file generated from the Word file in
Word it runs to 16,818! An estimate of the size of a well ordered HTML file is 3,300 characters.
The standards compliance is no better. The World Wide Web consortium (W3c) provide a standards checker. This tool finds 144 errors (and 1 warning) in my generated web page. There is no attempt to follow good web practice of separating the content of the page from its structure.
Even writing this article shows the problem with Word and the Web. I often construct the article off-line in Word and copy and paste it into the Brighthub on-line editor. If I copy and paste it directly I end up with rogue text like:
<!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0cm; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} @page Section1 {size:595.3pt 841.9pt; margin:72.0pt 90.0pt 72.0pt 90.0pt; mso-header-margin:35.4pt; mso-footer-margin:35.4pt; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} -->
This was generated when I copied the text in this section into the Brighthub editor. The solution is to cut and paste the text into Notepad then re-copy it from Notepad as plain text. This gives us a hint how to make use of Word in creating web pages.
There are many people who do not have the skills and resources to produce sophisticated websites with content management systems like Drupal, or sophisticated web development tools such as Dreamweaver. The same people may be quite confident with Word and use it for producing most of their other documents, so they quite reasonably expect to use Word to produce their Web pages, too.
This quite possible, but the trick is
to forget about Word’s WYSIWYG functionality and use it as a text editor. If we do this, then we can start to produce high quality web pages. Perhaps surprisingly, we can use some of the advanced features of Word to our advantage. We will explore how to do this in subsequent articles.