“Allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company.” —Email from BillG
Great article. Regarding the HTML purists, we made a help authoring tool inside (on top of) Word and when Windows Help converted to HTML we used the HTML Word generated, and we were surprised by the push back and complaints from the HTML purists. The compiled (compressed) help file would look the same with purist hand written code and Word created HTML. But that did not seem to matter, they were so upset about the extra HTML code. We ended up making our own HTML authoring tool.
This really drove me nuts. It was always obvious that HTML would end up like assembly language and that tools would do the heavy lifting. Once you started to see pages using tables as layout, then it was clear that tables weren't really tables anymore but just ways to get spacing right. Everything else followed. Of course Yahoo had a rule about 40K pages that looks laughable today :-)
I tried using Word to create a website back in the day but when the HTML generated for it was vast and incomprehensible, I gave up. I also remember trying to save to a web server and Word either locking up or crashing. It wasn't very pretty.
Thank you for the comment. Sorry! As mentioned there were many comments about how the HTML didn’t look like all the articles about how to create HTML. We were a bit ahead of the game here as of course today no one can ready any HTML on the web (sometimes obscured on purpose).
"After the stories ran, I would hear from a well-known blogger who thought we used a term he coined."
If I had a dime for every time that guy complained about not getting the credit he deserved ...
Great article. Regarding the HTML purists, we made a help authoring tool inside (on top of) Word and when Windows Help converted to HTML we used the HTML Word generated, and we were surprised by the push back and complaints from the HTML purists. The compiled (compressed) help file would look the same with purist hand written code and Word created HTML. But that did not seem to matter, they were so upset about the extra HTML code. We ended up making our own HTML authoring tool.
This really drove me nuts. It was always obvious that HTML would end up like assembly language and that tools would do the heavy lifting. Once you started to see pages using tables as layout, then it was clear that tables weren't really tables anymore but just ways to get spacing right. Everything else followed. Of course Yahoo had a rule about 40K pages that looks laughable today :-)
Thank you for the kind words!
I tried using Word to create a website back in the day but when the HTML generated for it was vast and incomprehensible, I gave up. I also remember trying to save to a web server and Word either locking up or crashing. It wasn't very pretty.
Thank you for the comment. Sorry! As mentioned there were many comments about how the HTML didn’t look like all the articles about how to create HTML. We were a bit ahead of the game here as of course today no one can ready any HTML on the web (sometimes obscured on purpose).