RE: Frame XML to HTML Help via XSLT

["David Knopf" <david@xxxxxxxxx>]

Glenn Maxey wrote: 

| 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.

True, though this is of course perfectly valid HTML and can be more
efficient, anyway. One could argue that: 

  <b>boldfaced text</b>

is more efficient than: 

  <span class="boldchars">boldfaced text</span>

though I tend not to get too exercised about matters like these so long
as the code is valid and will render correctly in the target browsers. 


| 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.)

For the record, you can get clean valid HTML code out of Word using
Quadralay's new product WordHelp. 

Regards, 

David Knopf / Knopf Online / San Francisco, CA 
mailto:david@knopf.com  /  http://www.knopf.com 

Consulting & Training on FrameMaker, WebWorks Publisher & WordHelp
Consulting & Training on RoboHelp 
WebWorks Publisher Certified 
Member, JavaHelp 2.0 Expert Group 
Moderator, HATT, wordhelp & wwp-users




** To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@omsys.com **
** with "unsubscribe framers" (no quotes) in the body.   **