rant on pathetic example of Microsoft FUD

[Greg Rundlett]

bscott at ntisys.com wrote:

>On Tue, 17 Aug 2004, at 7:01pm, puissante at lrc.puissante.com wrote:
>  
>
>>>Alas, human-friendly HTML is becoming rarer and rarer everyday.  These
>>>days, it almost seems like HTML is seen more like program output (like
>>>object code) then something you can actually design and write yourself.
>>>      
>>>
>>Tell that to my daughter. She prefers to crank out HTML by hand ...
>>    
>>
>
>  Me too.  I strongly suspect we're a tiny minority.
>
>  
>
Me three.  That's what got me going on this rant in the first place.  I 
usually clean up (tidy up) after sloppy coders/programs.  One of the 
problems with PowerPoint-generated HTML is that the signal to noise 
ratio is so low, that it can't be cleaned practically.  You could write 
the clean code by hand much faster than you could clean what it puts 
out.  HTML-tidy[1] has an option to clean Microsoft Word 2000 cruft[2].  
I applied that option to PowerPoint code, and the page  could not be 
rendered -- so obviously they've continued to elaborate on their 
well-formed brokenness while Tidy maintainers can't keep up.

[1] HTML-tidy http://tidy.sourceforge.net
[2] clean Microsoft Word 2000 cruft 
http://tidy.sourceforge.net/docs/quickref.html#word-2000