Joe Friend : HTML

XHTML output part 3

Jfriend — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 18:36:00 GMT

Zeyad has posted more information on the XHTML output from Word's new blog feature: Word XHTML - Mapping styles to semantics. Please read and comment. Thanks.

Blog post XHTML output part 2

Jfriend — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 01:58:00 GMT

Zeyad has more details on the XHTML output of the blog feature. His latest post focuses on compliance and styles. Give it a read and add your thoughts via comments.

HTML Output Spec

Jfriend — Wed, 24 May 2006 19:14:00 GMT

As I promised, we are posting details of the HTML output spec for the blog feature and are interested in getting your feedback. We've decided to host this on Brian Jones' blog, since the spec is of interest to his readers as well. Feel free to make your way over there and give us your two cents. Brian's blog gets a lot of attention from the /. crowd, so I can't help but add that constructive comments are always appreciated.

Word Blog HTML Quality

Jfriend — Tue, 16 May 2006 20:55:00 GMT

Every post you make as a blogger can be a huge learning experience. In Friday's post on the new Word 2007 blog post authoring feature I made a fairly modest claim that the HTML emitted by the feature would be better than the standard HTML from previous versions of Word. Well, it is, but I should have looked at the source code before I told everyone else to do so. There were a few problems:

Blog service vagaries

There were a number of issues introduced by Community Server (the blog system on which blogs.msdn.com is built). The upper case tags are the major example of that problem. Also, a number of issues were pointed out around the template for the site. The template is one of several standard CS template and, of course, had nothing to do with the HTML emitted by the blog feature (ID attributes with strange values are an example of this).

My stupid HTML mistakes

As I stated, I hand coded the image tags and I made a couple stupid HTML coding errors. Luckily I will not be shipped in the box with the feature and our developers will output it correctly.

Real problems we need to address

Also, several people made great suggestions for improvements that we want to look into. An example of this is needing to use <del> for strikethrough and the need to have proper tag content flow.

Goals

Most importantly I'd like to lay out the goals for the HTML output.

We will hand off valid XHTML for each post

We can't be held responsible for what Blogger, Spaces or anyone else does to the XHTML after we give it to them, but we'll send it to them as valid XHTML.

Clean HTML is more important than visual fidelity

This is a huge change for Word. Our focus has always been ensuring (as much as possible) that the HTML we output would result in full round trip of all the content and formatting in your document. The blog feature is all about representing what we can in a clean way without any special action/decision point on the part of the post author.

Suggestions welcome

With these two goals in mind, I would like to announce that we will post our the details of our XHTML output for public comment. The manner in which we do this (blog, discussion list, wiki, or something else) will be announced early next week. We can't promise that we will respond to all suggestions, but we will seriously consider them.

Blogging from Word 2007

Jfriend — Fri, 12 May 2006 12:42:00 GMT

Word is a great tool for writing stuff, right? Blogging is all about communicating with words (and pictures, too). So, why not use Word to write your blog posts?

Stop, don't jump to the end of this post to push the comment button yet. I'm not an idiot. I'm not endorsing you commit HTML suicide. If you've ever written a post in Word 2003 or before and then copied and pasted the text into your web browser you know what I'm talking about. Sure you can do it, but you have to run one of those HTML clean up tools so that your posts don't look mangled. Even then the HTML is not tight and clean, right?

Well no more. We've been working late into the nights and very late into our development schedule for Word 2007 and we have a special goody for all you bloggers in Beta 2 of Office 2007. That's right blog post authoring from Word. This is a very late breaking feature and is definitely beta software. That said, I hope that everyone is pleasantly surprised with where we are going with this feature.

Why bother?

When I write a blog post using my blog providers web-based editor I miss some of the familiar Word features that I've come to rely on, specifically background spelling (those little red squiggles) and autocorrect. These features keep me from making stupid mistakes. Also, I simply want to use the tool that I use for most of my other writing tasks.

Targeted user experience

Click on the picture above to see the a larger version of the image. Notice that the new user interface has been scoped to include the feature you most likely will need when authoring a blog post. We've gone from seven tabs on the ribbon to just two! The Home tab has been replaced with a Blog Post tab. We've add some special commands that you will need to manage your blog service accounts and publish your posts. We even added strikethrough to the basic text group since bloggers like using it so much.

Click on the images below to see the full tabs.

Publishing clean HTML to your blog

That's right. No more verbose Word HTML. The goal for this feature is not pure fidelity, but the right fidelity for your blog. The HTML for this post was created by Word. Go ahead, click View, Source in your browser and look at the HTML starting with "Word is a great tool..." We really are going pretty basic here. Bold become <strong>, Italic becomes <em>, Heading 1 become <h1>, Quotes become <blockquote> and on it goes. There are definitely kinks in Beta 2. For example we are encoding smart quotes incorrectly so I had to turn off that feature in Word, but the goal is to output just what is needed to make your blog post clean and readable (code and rendered HTML).

Pictures

When you set up your blog you can specify an upload site and Word will take care of uploading any pictures that you insert in the blog post. Also, we'll automatically generate & upload PNGs for the Office graphics (charts, diagrams, etc.) that you insert in your post.

In Beta 2 we have basic FTP support. We hope to add support for metaweblog API picture handling, SharePoint picture libraries, and one or two others. While we have a limited ability to add many more providers to this late breaking feature, the feature is extensible and other providers can insure that their systems work with Word even after Office 2007 ships.

Getting started

You can start a new blog by simply going to the File icon, New dialog and selecting "New Blog Post." Or, if you want to start your post from an existing document go to the File icon and select Publish and Blog.

Setting up your blog

This is pretty standard stuff if you've ever used one of the many blog post authoring applications. In Beta 2 we support MSN Spaces, SharePoint 2007 (of course), Blogger, and Community Server (which is used for blogs.msdn.com). You can also set up a custom account with services that support the metaweblog API or the ATOM API. All the blog providers seems to interpret these APIs a bit different so there kinks we're still working out. But the basics should work in Beta 2. We hope to add a few more services to the list before we ship. The Word blog authoring feature is extensible and we will publish information so that blog providers can insure that their systems work with Word.

More info coming…

We're excited about getting into more details about this feature, but I'm calling it a night now.

PS. A little honesty
Did I mention that this was beta software and we were running hot? For complete transparency I need to admit a couple things. I had to make a few hand tweaks to my post due to bugs (I'm sure our developer would blame it on user error). I had to upload and hand code the pictures because I had problems with my FTP site. And, I had to hand change the items with the CODE tag since we didn't map the Word code style correctly. You too can help find a report bugs with this feature once beta 2 is available. More on that later.

Whew! That feels better. Now I can sleep soundly.