RE: Frame XML to HTML Help via XSLT

["Glenn Maxey" <glenn.maxey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Speaking as a user of Mif2Go, its HTML output is as clean as the source
FM.

If you are diligent in using FM paragraph/character formats and have
configured Mif2Go to use a CSS, then you'll get class information in
your generated HTML tags (relating to the FM formats) that the Mif2Go
generated CSS can control. Because all our manuals are based on a single
style guide, I've only had to generate and tweak the CSS once.

If, however, your writers did the Word-thing everywhere of highlighting
and clicking "bold", "italic", "underline", etc. (e.g., not using
defined formats), you'll get a lot of corresponding HTML tags (e.g.,
<b>, <i>) that can't be controlled very well with a CSS.

In any event, I still find the produced HTML code very clean... clean
enough for me to write post-processing perl tools for. (I post-process
for other reasons.) Looking at an example, I see only two comments that
didn't come from my content or settings that I established for the
output generation. I have never seen the bogus tags that seem to
overwhelm Word-to-RTF and Word-to-HTML conversions. (With Word and its
conversions, it's always a question of "garbage-in, garbage-out." Every
notice how bloated its DOC files are? Even a brand-new Word document
with no content is 11 KB.)

Glenn Maxey
Technical Writer
Voyant Technologies, Inc.
1765 West 121st Avenue
Westminster, CO 80234-2301
Tel. +1 303.223.5164
Fax. +1 303.223.5275
glenn.maxey@voyanttech.com


> -----Original Message-----
> From: larry.kollar@arrisi.com [mailto:larry.kollar@arrisi.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, August 13, 2002 8:15 AM
> To: Framers List
> Cc: framers@omsys.com
> Subject: Re: Frame XML to HTML Help via XSLT

<snip>

> How clean is the HTML that WWP or Mif2Go generate? How
> much tweaking is required to produce something close to
> valid HTML?  This isn't just a pride-of-workmanship issue;
> the chance of unpleasant surprises is greater when you're
> dealing with sloppy HTML.

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