HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
</html>
Yeow! Where did the document go? Excessive markup makes the source
document almost humanly impossible to read. What infuriates document
purists like us, beyond the fact that lots of stuff that we neither wanted
nor asked for was added, is that Word automatically treats any text doc-
ument containing HTML markup as fodder for its mill. You can remove
the
.html
or
.htm
suffix from the filename or delete
<html>
and
<head>
from the document, to no availWord will still get you.
Microsoft isn't alone in cluttering the source. Most HTML editors add
at least a
<meta>
tag that contains their product information. Many go
through and "fix" your document to comply with current standards and
practices, toofor example, by adding all those paragraph and list-item
end tags that HTML allows you to omit. (From an XHTML standpoint, we
admit that this meddling is probably valid.)
To its credit, Word runs well, unlike other tools that routinely crashed
without warning as we fought with their treatment of the markup. Mi-
crosoft even offers a Word plug-in that removes the additional markup
so that you can recover a reasonable facsimile of the original docu-
ment.
[*]
[*]
You can find this plug-in at
http://office.microsoft.com/downloads/2000/Msohtmf2.aspx
.
17.2.2. When and Why to Edit the Editor
No matter how good the HTML editor is, you'll inevitably have to edit the
(albeit cluttered) source it generates. We've had to do it a lot ourselves,
and so have all the web developers we've talked with over the last few
years.
Not all HTML editors provide an easy means to add JavaScript to your
documents, and many are not up-to-date with the HTML/XHTML and
CSS2 standards. Remember, too, that the popular browsers don't al-
