Scobleizer - Latest Comments in Microsoft Word generates clean HTML for blogs?

Re: Microsoft Word generates clean HTML for blogs?

Jeff Blum — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 17:26:57 -0000

Another Word cleanup tool (free and online, or available in PHP to download and implement in any project):

http://www.webmastersherpa....

Regards,
Jeff

Re: Microsoft Word generates clean HTML for blogs?

fred — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 16:57:29 -0000

I know this is a bit off topic...but if you want a doc converted to HTML try this:
http://www.documentsforthew...
Fred

Re: Microsoft Word generates clean HTML for blogs?

Cliverty — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 00:59:54 -0000

Copy paste - even using styles and the new blogformat option is all messed up in Word 2007.

I can take any Word 97-2003 document and copy past directly to the web - discussion boards etc and all formatting is preserved without stupid [FONT] tags inserted all over the text that is pasted.

But try doing that in Word 2007! It just doesn't work. About the best I can get from it is letting 2007 removing all my work put into formatting the text -- and then paste it.

What a pain!

How can I get the simple copy-paste-that-works feature of Word 97-2003?

Bob

Re: Microsoft Word generates clean HTML for blogs?

Tom Cooper — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 14:45:37 -0000

I wasted a week, first trying to convert a Word 2007 document (.docx) or Word "Compatibility Mode" (.doc) with images to a webpage by saving it as .htm, or by writing the document as HTML and saving it as .htm. All I got was HTML text on the webpage! Then my son told me Word-to-HTML sucks, just write the HTML in Wordpad, save as .txt, FTP it to the server and rename it there to .htm. Works fine.

Re: Microsoft Word generates clean HTML for blogs?

unicynic — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 22:51:49 -0000

Well, I tried that feature and I was amazed. If they can get it right, can't they at least introduce a new save-as feature? Like "save-as-blog-html" so at least we can use that for those blogs that Word does not support.
BTW, it seems they've ported that to (or maybe it was ported from) Microsoft Windows Live Writer. Now, I think this is a very cool tool. Works nicely with WordPress after some minimal changes to web config. I've documented it in my blog though.

Re: Microsoft Word generates clean HTML for blogs?

Khun T — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 04:17:36 -0000

I just posted about Word 2007 as a blog wriing tool. The content is in Thai, though. It is not as good as Writer from the blog writer perspective. Still have some problem to upload pictures to wordpress, problem with Category, no additional support for Tag, etc. But as a simple Blog writing tool, I think it is quite good. No need to learn new thing.

Re: Microsoft Word generates clean HTML for blogs?

thorp — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 16:07:17 -0000

beautiful online information center. greatest work... thanks

Re: Microsoft Word generates clean HTML for blogs?

carvel — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 16:07:17 -0000

Very needed information found here, thank you for your work

Re: Microsoft Word generates clean HTML for blogs?

mcm — Mon, 22 May 2006 20:18:40 -0000

Robert: That's what I was trying to find out, thanks very much for letting me know.

Re: Microsoft Word generates clean HTML for blogs?

Jarrod — Mon, 22 May 2006 19:49:40 -0000

For me, this is HUGE. A big part of my job is converting your average Word-produced business documents into something our intranet application won't choke on. And it always chokes on the invalid markup generated by Word. Even the "Save As Web" command produces something so far from valid XHTML it's scary. That's before you deal with the nexted divs & font tags...ugh... nightmarish. Especially when business owners don't understand why you can't just copy and paste from Word.

For a while I was using Textism Word Cleaner tool, and that worked well. Looking forward to this new feature... hopefully they'll extend it to the rest of the Office suite (at least the ones that support "Save as web page".

Re: Microsoft Word generates clean HTML for blogs?

Matthew Stibbe — Sat, 20 May 2006 10:06:51 -0000

Couldn't agree more. I use Word for my daily work (I'm primarily a writer) but if I cut and paste text from Word into my blog (http://www.badlanguage.net) or my flying website (http://www.modernpilot.com) it comes with a complete set of Microsoft-specific tags that I don't want or need. The easiest way to wash them out is - get this - to paste the text into Notepad and then copy it from there. How low-tech is that? It's encouraging to know that there's someone inside Microsoft who understands this daily frustration.

Re: Microsoft Word generates clean HTML for blogs?

Robert Scoble — Sat, 20 May 2006 01:50:26 -0000

mcm: Wordpress already is supported because Wordpress supports the Metaweblog API.

Re: Microsoft Word generates clean HTML for blogs?

mcm — Sat, 20 May 2006 01:15:00 -0000

Will it ever be likely that common open source blogging tools like Wordpress will be supported?

Re: Microsoft Word generates clean HTML for blogs?

Sam Sethi — Fri, 19 May 2006 02:33:24 -0000

This is good news but which version(s) of XHTML will Word render - 1.0 transitional, 1.1 strict or 2.0?

I for one think this is the strongest reason to upgrade my version of Outlook and Word so long as the metaweblog API and Atom publication support allow me to blog to a variety of blogging tools and not just Spaces.

I wonder if Microsoft could go further and fully support CSS for template formatting in Word and JavaScript for macros.

Re: Microsoft Word generates clean HTML for blogs?

farlane — Thu, 18 May 2006 16:36:58 -0000

You can get an amen, Darren. I'll even throw in an Alleluia. I cannot count the hours I have wasted dorking around with terribly formatted Word output.

Re: Microsoft Word generates clean HTML for blogs?

Elias — Thu, 18 May 2006 13:14:35 -0000

Regarding post #24 - pretty good analysis!

I just checked windows media player ver 10
and it seems to allow mp3 up to 320 Kbps.
And the max for Windows Media Audio is 192Kbps.
There is a lossless option that goes up to 940Kbps.

I happen to believe that you are right about previous versions. So hopefully other things will continue in this direction (of competative sotware).

Re: Microsoft Word generates clean HTML for blogs?

Pidge — Thu, 18 May 2006 11:41:21 -0000

Paul,
Just like Dream Weaver, our blog editor (Zoundry), also has to do "special work" to clean up MS Word generated content. The Word's "Save as Filtered HTML" helps, but we found most users simply copy and paste from MS Word (can't blame them).

In our case, (in addition for validation), we have to go to great pains to clean up (at least we try) the content so that we have a well formed xml document (which we need to use as a in-memory memory model).

Re: Microsoft Word generates clean HTML for blogs?

Ben — Thu, 18 May 2006 09:47:11 -0000

Are you they aren't just saying that "normal people don't care about HTML quality" because they can't openly tell you the truth - that they've been told to generate munged output that only works in IE as an attempt at browser lock-in?

If that's not the purpose, it's certainly an effect.

I think there's a certain level of doublethink going on at Microsoft. In the past, you could at least be open internally about anti-competitive moves like integrating IE into the OS (Brad Silverberg's famous comment about the pressure to do "unnatural and losing things to 'protect' Windows" and fear that "trying to win the Internet using Windows is a losing strategy"), but now there's too much risk of a conversation like that coming to light via subpoena (as Brad's did).

There are still so many little details of Windows and MS software that are clearly attempts to achieve lock-in (why is the MP3 ripping support in my Media Player limited to only 56kbps quality, if not to steer me into using WMA?). Someone's taken the decision to pursue a lock-in strategy there, but how is this stuff discussed? Face-to-face in a sauna to avoid bugging? By exchanging memos on rice paper?

Not only is lock-in annoying, but in an age of software distribution via HTTP, it's going to get increasingly ineffective. When I can download iTunes and VLC, why would I stick with crappy WMP? Users might not fully understand why they can't turn up the MP3 quality slider, but they'll certainly have learnt that it's better to try and find an alternative that works properly than try to fix the Microsoft solution.

There's a conversation that's worth having within Microsoft. Lock-in is lame and it doesn't work, so why don't you eradicate it? Does Hotmail have free POP access for everyone yet, like Gmail does? Does *every* app have an Export button as well as an Import button (and is the output in an open format like OPML? and is it human readable or hopelessly munged and riddled with CDATA?)

If MS apps are truly offering the best experience, and not just relying on bundling and lock-in, then they should let users get their data out in useful formats. The Word team has taken a step in the right direction.

Re: Microsoft Word generates clean HTML for blogs?

Paul Morriss — Thu, 18 May 2006 09:38:38 -0000

Tell those program managers "your competitors won't be able to boast that their product can clean up Word HTML". I've got Dreamweaver Ultradev 4 and it has a special function to do just that.

I've had to sort out a web page created using a dynamic edit control where the user had pasted Word text into the WYSIWYG edit box. He cared that it looked a mess by the time it was rendered on a web page.

Re: Microsoft Word generates clean HTML for blogs?

Scott Fletcher — Thu, 18 May 2006 09:26:45 -0000

Thanks for bringing that up! When blogging/building my show notes for Podcheck, I copy-paste from my Outlook e-mails. I have hacked countless PHP and java scripts on my blog site to strip out those lame "mso:normal blah; blah:lame size:12pt style:css:unecessary:crap-12 mso:makes-me:so-mad" tags. Thank you Scoble!

Re: Microsoft Word generates clean HTML for blogs?

twisterjosh — Thu, 18 May 2006 08:57:10 -0000

Saving the web page as an HTML (Filtered) page usually takes away a lot of the crappy html... still not as clean as I'd like it though, but only a million times better than saving it as you normally would.

Re: Microsoft Word generates clean HTML for blogs?

Adam S — Thu, 18 May 2006 08:36:23 -0000

Seriously, though, why would I want to use a word processing program to post to a blog? Any blog software worth its weight in salt has an interface for quickly posting, many of them have WYSIWYG interfaces now. If your blog supports the metaweblog API, which I can safely suppose from the screenshots is a requirement of using Word like this anyway, it almost definitely has customizable posting capabilities already.

I saw this, and I suppose it's nice to add a new feature beyond a shell that blends into the Windows environment, but isn't this just the Word team adding features for the sake of adding features? Were there people clamoring for this?

Re: Microsoft Word generates clean HTML for blogs?

Mat Steeples — Thu, 18 May 2006 08:01:31 -0000

at #7. Am I the only person to find it funny that http://www.badpage.info doesn't even validate against it's own tests? :P

Mat

Re: Microsoft Word generates clean HTML for blogs?

Brian — Thu, 18 May 2006 04:27:07 -0000

I remember when I built my first websites, back in 2000, I used to use Word 97 with the HTML editor as it was simple and easy to use for someone inexperienced in HTML like myself.

It's nice to hear that Word can yet have a role in web publishing in the modern web - while maybe there are better tools out there, few have the sheer accessibility of Word.

Re: Microsoft Word generates clean HTML for blogs?

dbarefoot — Thu, 18 May 2006 01:09:27 -0000

Can I get an amen? Thank the Lord for clean HTML.