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Blaming Word (Processors) for poor markup?

I was playing about in MS word the other day (thats the wild life I lead btw) and something hit me like a car.  Do you web designers out there practice semantic markup in MS word or whichever other Word Processing package you use?  It occured to me that I was using Word’s inbuilt styles functionality to control things like headings, bullets and paragraphs semantically, so everything would actually be marked up correctly.  The problem came when it came to integrating a colleague’s section into the document, which of course looked extremely messed as they had manually controlled the look of their text.  The most noticeable thing to me was putting additional line breaks in between paragraphs.  So it was end of paragraph, line break, next line break, start of next paragraph.  For me, that just doesn’t work.  It should be Paragraph, line break, next paragraph.  Thats the way I do it in XHTML and thats the way I do it in Word.  You can then control the spacing between paragraphs using the before and after padding options when setting the styles.  Easy.  Of course, editing word documents lets people fall into the same trap as novice (or lazy) web developers, style the individual pieces of text and to hell with the consequences.  It looks good now right?  Right!?!?  I’ve heard that before…
If you do mark up your documents this way you inherit all the benefits of CSS controlled XHTML web pages.  You can control the whole documents style through the style functionality.  Which is really fantastic news if you need to make some quick format changes, like expanding line spacing for readability or changing a font (or corporate style).  You can also apply defult styles to word documents, which means you can enforce a certain level of conformity throughout the documents you, or your organisation produce.  The only problem is, you really need to make other people aware of this new way of working.

So, if your producing documentation, do you follow the same guidelines you do when designing for the web?

This post was written on Friday, August 4th 2006 by Simon T and has been categorised under Opinion , Technology , Web 2.0. The trackback URL is here or you could add a response. If you really want to you can Digg Story or add it to del.icio.us, Technorati Cosmos, Blinklist, furl or Reddit.

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