Dean Allen of Textism Provides Word Cleaning Service

Zeldman had a post today about a service being provided by Textism that will Clean up Microsoft Word generated HTML files

Many people might be familar with the Dreamweaver plugin that claims to do something similar but Dean’s service goes one step further to convert typographic entities into their propery HTML entities. Plus you dont have to buy/use Dreamweaver ;)

Zeldman’s statement:

“We must put all our Word documents online.” Eight words that strike fear into the hearts of web professionals everywhere.

Is so so so true! Wrangling with Word documents at work is usually done by basically copying out the text and rebuilding the formatting by hand using HTML.

Another infobit from Zeldman that I found nice to hear:

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Besides using Word Cleaner, the other thing web pros can do is ask their colleagues who write Word documents to use standard headings that map to (X)HTML h1, h2, and h3 headlines, instead of using “MyFunkyStyle3” or similar constructions.

If structured markup is one key to the longevity and accessibility of the organization’s site, it is easier to get there when the document being converted maps to standard structural elements than when it does not.

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Remember this! :)