[thelist] Am I being BS'd?

[Janet Green]

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. 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. One of the problems I pointed out to the designers was the fact that their code is not terribly tidy and therefore hard to wade through when making changes. (SHE works on Front Page's "Normal" view, but when it screws up, she calls me in to fix it and *I* work in HTML view.)

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.

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

Janet