[thelist] Am I being BS'd?

[martin.p.burns at uk.pwcglobal.com]

Memo from Martin P Burns of PricewaterhouseCoopers

-------------------- Start of message text --------------------



Subject:  [thelist] Am I being BS'd?


>Guess I have some reading to do, but I'll ask you folks first. One of our
internal departments has a website, designed and now hosted by a local
firm, which >was supposed to be easy for a non-HTML expert to go in and
make changes to using Front Page.

hahahahaha
(sorry)
This will work as long as the page is reasonably simple, and most of it is
uneditable (includes are good for this).

>The gal in charge of updating the online newsletter portion of this site
is having trouble making each month's articles fit into the nested table
layout.

Ah, there's your problem - complex nesting will not be nice.

>One of the problems I pointed out to the designers was the fact that their
code is not terribly tidy

FrontPage historically would 'improve' your code... nice to
have a tool which thinks it knows better than you do.

>The firm's project manager pointed to a reference in the printed code (36
pages for a single on-screen page!) that says something like, "<p >class
="MsoNormal" style
="text-align:justify;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none">" etc
etc - and said that these references to "MSO" were put into >the code when
we would try to copy and paste text from an MS Word document into Front
Page.

Yup, that's a copy and paste from Word2k artefact (copy from Word97 was
pretty good). You get the same if you copy from Word and paste into DW
too.

>This sounded logical to me, but I'd never heard that Front Page would try
to maintain Word's formatting. Is that true?

Yes, it does very much so. And if you don't care about the resulting
HTML, just how well it reflects the Word formatting, you'll be fine.

Of course, if your HTML isn't a direct mimic of the Word doc (ie it
has layout, navigation and so on), you'll hit problems.

[Don't get me started on 'smart' quotes, copyright and tm marks btw...
they're a major hassle, even if you're using a CMS. If you copy from
Word and paste into an IE form, IE will try to maintain the format,
which will screw up in most CMSs because it's expecting ASCII]

>(If so, then that makes the site even MORE unfriendly for a non-HTML
person to update, because that person is then going to have to take
newsletter articles >OUT of Word and INTO something else before she can
copy and paste them - extra steps, it seems to me.)

Or better, don't use Word as your writing tool, do it straight into
something which understands HTML properly. DW or HomeSite
are both good for that.

>We've just been really frustrated with the firm's interpretation of
"simple to update," and we're all now looking for ways to simplify what
should have been >simple to start with. Thanks for any light you can shed
on "MSO-Normal" and all that junk.

Looks like you're in the market for a CMS which separates content from
presentation... but even most of those have problems if you want to
do microformatting (lists, 'real' tables (presenting tabular data), links,
<hx>, bold, italics without knowing any HTML). Generally, I teach
content managers some simple (non-layout) HTML and give them
a cheatsheet, which mostly works.

Cheers
Martin



--------------------- End of message text --------------------

This e-mail is sent by the above named in their
individual, non-business capacity and is not on
behalf of PricewaterhouseCoopers.

PricewaterhouseCoopers may monitor outgoing and incoming
e-mails and other telecommunications on its e-mail and
telecommunications systems.
----------------------------------------------------------------
The information transmitted is intended only for the person or entity to
which it is addressed and may contain confidential and/or privileged
material.  Any review, retransmission, dissemination or other use of, or
taking of any action in reliance upon, this information by persons or
entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited.   If you received
this in error, please contact the sender and delete the material from any
computer.