converting documents to HTML

[Davinder]

can anyone recommend a good tool to convert documents to HTML on the
fly. I need to integrate this tool with a VB app so it must have an
API.

thanks in advance
Davinder
da******@gujral .co.uk

[Philip Herlihy]

Ok, so my posting was mischievous - I knew there would be howls (and I was
full of beer at the time!). I also know that Word-generated HTML is bloated
with all sorts of stuff - there to support Word features when HTML is
chosen as a document's native format. MS have even provided a filter to
weed it out when no longer needed (well worth investigating). MS is anyway
moving towards XML format, which will offer new opportunities to improve
things.

But does "clean HTML" matter in itself, independently of the purpose of the
page? I don't think so. If you have a page which must load quickly, then
you'd probably optimise by hand, and I doubt anyone who writes a lot of web
pages will choose Word as their editor of choice. But when you have an
occasional document which you'd like to make available on the web, it'll
depend on whether 28 seconds of a visitor's time is worth more than the time
it would take to make the conversion. It'll usually be worth running the
filter, but if the web performance is that important, then Word is not for
you. I'm not immune to prissiness about HTML - one of my sites has a page
which is taken from an Excel spreadsheet, and every time I copy and paste I
shudder momentarily at the redundancy in the resulting code. But it's only
occasionally visited (that's fine by me) and it's not worth additional
effort. Horses for courses - HTML "flower arranging" is not for me without
some real benefit in view.

Darin commented earlier that editing automatically-generated HTML is a
nightmare. So don't do it. The software engineering world is full of
useful products that shrink development times dramatically by generating
code. It's always hideous, but if you're paying for the time of software
engineers that's a compelling deal. The trick is to make sure you do all
editing through the generator, and separate out anything likely to need
hand-optimisation into a separate module.

--
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## PH, London ##
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"Stephen Poley" <sb*****@xs4all .nl> wrote in message
news:1f******** *************** *********@4ax.c om...

On Thu, 10 Jul 2003 00:03:37 +0000 (UTC), "Philip Herlihy"
<fo******@REMOV Eherlihy.eu.com > wrote:

Of course. But who cares?

(Further context vanished because the quoted text was part of the sig.
Please have a read of http://www.xs4all.nl/~sbpoley/toppost.htm).

Maybe your readers might just care? I tried using Word-generated HTML
just once. It was horrible. My hand-coded version took 2 seconds to load
from my local hard disk. The Word-generated version took 30 seconds.
(That's not a typo - it took about fifteen times as long!!) By the time
it had come from a server over a modem link, you can be pretty sure that
most of my visitors would have gone elsewhere.

--
Stephen Poley

http://www.xs4all.nl/~sbpoley/webmatters/

[Philip Herlihy]

Spotted this link to an HTML filter for Office 2000. The filter appears to
be built into Office XP.

http://office.microsoft.com/download.../Msohtmf2.aspx

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## PH, London ##
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da******@gujral .co.uk says...

can anyone recommend a good tool to convert documents to HTML on the
fly. I need to integrate this tool with a VB app so it must have an
API.

[Philip Herlihy]

Yikes:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/tre...n/MS03-023.asp

--
############### #######
## PH, London ##
############### #######

"Philip Herlihy" <fo******@REMOV Eherlihy.eu.com > wrote in message
news:be******** **@titan.btinte rnet.com...

Spotted this link to an HTML filter for Office 2000. The filter appears to be built into Office XP.

http://office.microsoft.com/download.../Msohtmf2.aspx

--
############### #######
## PH, London ##
############### #######

da******@gujral .co.uk says...
> can anyone recommend a good tool to convert documents to HTML on the
> fly. I need to integrate this tool with a VB app so it must have an
> API.

[Stephen Poley]

On Thu, 10 Jul 2003 13:32:24 +0000 (UTC), "Philip Herlihy"
<fo******@REMOV Eherlihy.eu.com > wrote:

But does "clean HTML" matter in itself, independently of the purpose of the
page? I don't think so. If you have a page which must load quickly, then
you'd probably optimise by hand
When writing a program, one typically starts by doing it in the most
straightforward fashion. If this isn't fast enough, then one starts
optimising.

But in HTML the most straightforward fashion normally *is* the optimised
version. One just has to avoid getting a lot of superfluous crud in
there in the first place.

Clean HTML also typically matters if you want your page to be properly
readable by browsers other than IE.
But when you have an
occasional document which you'd like to make available on the web, it'll
depend on whether 28 seconds of a visitor's time is worth more than the time
it would take to make the conversion.

Firstly - that 28 seconds was from my example on the local hard disk.
Over a modem we're probably talking about more than a minute extra time.

For the rest - it depends. Occasionally one might indeed resort to a
simple dump from Word. But the original question was "can anyone
recommend a good tool to convert documents to HTML" - note the word
'good' - and in that context Word is hardly appropriate.

--
Stephen Poley

http://www.xs4all.nl/~sbpoley/webmatters/

[Leslie]

On Thu, 10 Jul 2003 13:32:24 +0000 (UTC), "Philip Herlihy"
<fo******@REMOV Eherlihy.eu.com > wrote:

I'm not immune to prissiness about HTML - one of my sites has a page
which is taken from an Excel spreadsheet, and every time I copy and paste I
shudder momentarily at the redundancy in the resulting code. But it's only
occasionally visited (that's fine by me) and it's not worth additional
effort.

A few months ago I found a nifty little program that converts Excel
spreadsheets to clean HTML. It's called XLS2HTML and you can find out
more about it at: http://www.finertechnologies.com/index-xls2html.html

When I got it the download was free. The site above now offers a free
trial version that times out in 10 days. Still, it was a god send for
me, and still is. A quick look at the site also shows a program
called DOC2HTML. Worth checking out......

Haven't seen this mentioned in the thread, but another option for
converting pages for the web - Adobe Acrobat - .pdf.

Just more of my $.02.

Leslie

[Jonathan Snook]

"Philip Herlihy" <fo******@REMOV Eherlihy.eu.com > wrote in message
news:be******** **@titan.btinte rnet.com...

Spotted this link to an HTML filter for Office 2000. The filter appears to be built into Office XP.

http://office.microsoft.com/download.../Msohtmf2.aspx

If anyone knows of a super Word code cleaner, I'd love to hear it. What I
end up having to do is using the HTML filter, then removing all spans, all
divs, all class and style attributes and then manually set all the list
items. It's a royal pain (yet a process I've managed to get down to about
5-10 mins per document).

Jonathan

[Philip Herlihy]

Thanks for the note, Mark, but I'm not really that interested in this
debate. We'll have to agree to differ.

--
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## PH, London ##
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"Mark Parnell" <we*******@clar kecomputers.com .au> wrote in message
news:3f******** *************** @freenews.iinet .net.au...

Philip Herlihy wrote:

On top-posting:

[Jacqui or (maybe) Pete]

In article <qooPa.125390$x 4o.46930
@news04.bloor.i s.net.cable.rog ers.com>, go************* **@snook.ca
says...

"Philip Herlihy" <fo******@REMOV Eherlihy.eu.com > wrote in message
news:be******** **@titan.btinte rnet.com...

Spotted this link to an HTML filter for Office 2000. The filter appears .... http://office.microsoft.com/download.../Msohtmf2.aspx

If anyone knows of a super Word code cleaner, I'd love to hear it. What I
end up having to do is using the HTML filter, then removing all spans, all
divs, all class and style attributes and then manually set all the list

....

http://www.jafsoft.com/detagger/ will do quite a lot of that.

[Jonathan Snook]

"Jacqui or (maybe) Pete" <po****@spamcop .net> wrote in message
news:MP******** *************** *@news.CIS.DFN. DE...

If anyone knows of a super Word code cleaner, I'd love to hear it. What I end up having to do is using the HTML filter, then removing all spans, all divs, all class and style attributes and then manually set all the list

http://www.jafsoft.com/detagger/ will do quite a lot of that.

That does do quite a bit. That in combination with TidyHTML, it's 90% there!
:-) Thank you very much for the link.

Jonathan

[Tim]

On Thu, 10 Jul 2003 12:57:48 +0000 (UTC),
"Philip Herlihy" <fo******@REMOV Eherlihy.eu.com > wrote:

However, I'm not going to stop top-posting, because I strongly
prefer it, and I'm voting with my postings, as it were.

The most important thing to remember, is that if you're posting seeking
solutions, then you want to post in a manner that's most likely to get
you *USEFUL* answers.

a. Post the same as the others, i.e. in the preferred style for
where you're posting.

b. Post in a manner that's suitable for the recipients more than
your own prejudices.

c. You're most likely to get the correct information from the old
hands, and many of them will just ignore top-posting.

You're cutting off your own nose to spite your face, with what you've
said.

--
My "from" address is totally fake. (Hint: If I wanted e-mails from
complete strangers, I'd have put a real one, there.) Reply to usenet
postings in the same place as you read the message you're replying to.