WYSIWYG editors and extraneous code

[Sheryl Dwinell]

Does anyone have a particular WYSIWYG editor that they think does a good
job of NOT inserting lots of extraneous code?  I recently worked on a
PageMaker file converted using Adobe Pagemill that was loaded with
unnecessary tagging.  It had a table that was pretty long and after going
through it, I managed to cut the file size by about 40% and it loaded in
the browser twice as fast as before.  One of the strange things it did was
put <font color="#000000"> before each line of text. Totally unnecessary
since black text is the default!  Someone else has asked me how you can
open files in Word97 and edit them, but not have Word97 insert it's own
bits of fluff on top of your already clean HTML file.  I didn't have an
answer, unfortunately.  It's really frustrating because in order to farm
out more of the HTML editing responsibilities, folks want to use WYSIWYG
editors because they don't want to learn HTML. Although I do make a point
of telling them that knowing HTML is a good thing. Sure the pages look just
fine, but I haven't had a page yet that made it through a validator
unscathed.  Perhaps my viewpoint is skewed by having learned HTML by hand
before I ever touched an editor, so I tend to be more aware of all the
things I find unnecessary in a page that has been constructed with PageMill
or FP97 or (yuck) Netscape Gold's editor.  Personally, I use FP98 and go
into the HTML and try and ferret out any odd stuff and then run it through
a validator. Yet, I still get FP changing the DOCTYPE information
(replacing W3C with IETF and adding 'target' to my anchor tags <a
href="blah.html" target> This last one has me stumped.

Sheryl Dwinell * Cataloger/DBM Librarian/Webmaster
Memorial Library * Marquette University
P.O. Box 3141 * Milwaukee, WI 53201-3141
414-288-3406 * dwinells at vms.csd.mu.edu