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Design A Web Page Article
Never even think of using Microsoft Word for your web design purpose!
Word is a document processor and do not use it in your web design efforts. There
are better and free HTML editors that you can use come out with a classic web
design.
Many problems can crop up if you use Word as an HTML editor. It is not meant to
be used in your web design and the most important reasons for not using it is
given below.
Why Word is Bad for the Web.
Every so often, you might see text on the web that appears to be corrupted in
some way. It's full of odd foreign letters to the point where it's almost
unreadable, and it took ages to load. Believe it or not, nine times out of ten
the culprit is a program that many people use every day: Microsoft Word, the
world's most popular word processor. That's because, while Word might be
perfectly good for producing documents to print and email to people, Word is bad
for the web.
The Quote Problem.
All those foreign letters you see in that text were originally nothing more than
an attempt to make documents a tiny bit nicer to look at. You see, the design of
the keyboard comes from the age of typewriters, and the symbols present
represent the kind of writing that appears on typewriters. We're stuck with our
keyboard designs, but they were never meant to account for all the extra letters
and characters included in modern fonts. This led to the quote problem.
Now these malformed quotes can interfere with you web design plan. In fact, it
can really make your web site look ugly and unapproachable.
What's the quote problem? Well, to answer it, take a look at your keyboard.
Notice how there's only one kind of double-quote mark – the straight one. Worse,
when you want a single quote, you have to use the same key as for apostrophes!
Now, if you were writing on paper, you'd put different shaped quotes at the
start and end of a quote, instead of just making straight lines. Altogether,
things that would be represented by five different marks on paper only get two
symbols on the keyboard.
Long ago, Microsoft decided to solve this problem. First, they set up Word to
look for quote marks and replace them with nicer, curly quotes, known as 'smart
quotes'. Then, they took some unused character codes – hey, what could anyone
ever want those for? – and decided that they would represent these new, pretty
quotes.
Everything was fine until, years later, people started copying text they'd
written in Word and pasting onto the web. Because Microsoft didn't stick to any
international standard when they chose how to represent their smart quotes, the
quotes ended up displaying as all sorts of unintended strange letters in web
browsers. Word's users never meant to do this, but Word had gone ahead and done
it for them, because smart quotes is turned on by default!
Not so smart after all, was it?
But from the perspective of your web design, this is not smart at all. What's
the point in you doing your web design on word to find out later on that your
pages are showing as ugly beasts - which you never wanted in the first place.
One more point to refrain from using Word as your HTML editor in your web design efforts. And it not required when very good HTML editors are freely available on the Internet.
Terrible HTML.
Of course, there's more to all this. When Microsoft finally caught on that the
web was going to be big, they quickly added web features to Word, not least of
which is the ability to save documents to HTML. Unfortunately for the rest of
the world, though, Microsoft again failed to stick to any standards at all. They
made up their own HTML tags to represent the layout of Word documents, purely to
make sure that the documents would look the same if people wanted to open them
in Word and save them in another format. These proprietary tags now pollute HTML
documents all over the web, simply because the people who created the pages by
saving as HTML in Word don't know enough to remove them – and they make pages
load much more slowly.
So the whole process of web design has suffered. One wishes if Microsoft has
shown a little vision in this matter.
Worse, even if you do remove all the Word-specific tags from the documents, the
leftover HTML is still a nightmare. Presumably Microsoft decided to re-use the
HTML generation engine from FrontPage, with the same kinds of results – a
complete and utter mess.
So to avoid all these mess, simply stick to a decent HTML editor for your web
design needs. This is far better than trying to use word as an HTML editor.
Smart Tags.
Do you think it ends there? Amazingly, it doesn't. For their latest versions of
Word, Microsoft decided it'd be great to add something they called 'smart tags'
– a kind of 'link' that adds contextual information to things you type. For
example, if you type an address in your document, that address allows you to
link through to a map. Useful? Very rarely.
The problem comes when documents containing smart tags are saved as HTML – the
tags are saved too! This means that documents all over the web have odd text
linked to completely frivolous places, simply because Word thought it looked
like an address. Not only do these links take ages to load correctly, but
they're ugly too.
What might Microsoft Word unleash upon the web next? We can only wait in fear.
Hope you have realized why you should not use Word as as a web design software.
You need to use other HTML editors. Period.
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