A practical solution for web publishing

Having noticed that the current model for web publishing actually places the authors back to a less comfortable place than they have enjoyed in the world of computer-based and fully electronic publishing, the legitimate question is now: Why can’t we use our good old word processing programs to generate content for web sites? Indeed, this solution would be the easiest: authors would keep using their now familiar word-processing software, with all the advantages of simple revision process, relatively easy file and version management, etc. Beside the solution of producing exclusively text-formatted output (i.e. PDF or Word files), this solution needs a complement to become workable in a real web development: the ability to transform the word-processor document into a real web-publishable set of files (HTML or script-based). These functionalities can be easily achieved from within a classical word processing program, however, since all major programs in this field include an extensive set of macro and programming tools. This is what was made with the “Web publishing.dot” document template that is used for the project i-Structures of the Swiss Virtual Campus. A set of macros able to adequately transform word-processor files into a set of HTML-publishable documents was developed using Visual Basic for Applications within Microsoft Word. The process of transforming a Word file into a set of HTML (and also ASP or PHP) pages gives authors the possibility to directly transform their text (including images) into web pages. The translation process takes a few seconds to a couple minutes depending on the document, and the result is a series of files that can directly be published on the web. The resulting HTML code is very compact and easy to edit, should this become necessary.

Creating, maintaining and enhancing documents

The use of the document template places only a few restrictions to the author, mainly in line with the simple, more efficient, model on which HTML documents are based. Only a handful of paragraph styles are available: those directly supported by HTML (various levels of titles, text paragraphs, lists and tables). In addition, specific styles have been included to reflect the needs of the project, mainly emphasizing the content by color highlights. Section 4 of the present document gives details about the various styles available for use in the preparation of documents. Features not supported include at the present time the inclusion of user-defined color text. The inclusion of complex web entities, such as applets, is made possible by the use of a style that is directly translated into HTML.