[WEB4LIB] Re: converting HTML to XHTML

[Marieke Napier]

I agree with what Thomas has said...you may need to seriously rethink how
you are creating and serving up your Web pages.

This aside I can recommend a programme that does an excellent job of
converting HTML to XHTML.  HTML-Kit is great for tidying up and validating
up your code.  It is also really easy to use and well supported.

http://www.chami.com/html-kit/

Good Luck.

Marieke
--------------------------------------------------------
Marieke Napier, Information Officer
Editor of the Cultivate Interactive Web magazine
UKOLN, University of Bath, BATH, England, BA2 7AY
Exploit Interactive: http://www.exploit-lib.org/
Cultivate Interactive: http://www.cultivate-int.org/
Homepage: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/m.napier/
Phone: 01225 826354
FAX: 01225 826838



----- Original Message -----
From: "Thomas Dowling" <tdowling at ohiolink.edu>
To: "Multiple recipients of list" <web4lib at webjunction.org>
Sent: Monday, April 02, 2001 12:43 PM
Subject: [WEB4LIB] Re: converting HTML to XHTML


> > Our library recently exported an Excel table to HTML and posted it to
> our
> > Web site.  The table is a huge document and contains a ton of HTML
> coding,
> > which, unfortunately, results in lengthy downloading time.  To speed up
> > downloading time, we need to decrease the amount of HTML coding the
> table
> > contains.  One idea was to convert the HTML coding to XHTML.  Thus, many
> of
> > the table tags would be eliminated and replaced by style sheet
> instructions.
> >   Is there a program that can convert HTML to XHTML?  If so, would it
> > replace HTML coding (for tables) into style sheet instructions?  Thanks.
> >
>
> Someone is misleading you about what XHTML is.  It is neither more nor
> less than a rewritting of HTML 4.01 from SGML to XML.  It adds no new
> functionality and cannot magically make a huge table fast to load.  It
> *is* possible to rewrite many pages that use tables for layout, using
> carefully constructed stylesheets.  That is not related to using XHTML,
> and it isn't intended to replace pages with actual tabular data.
>
>
> >From your several posts about this table, let me make the following
> recommendations:
>
> Don't rely on Excel, or any Office application, to generate HTML for you.
> Or at least, if you do so, be prepared for a lot of manual clean-up.  For
> Excel tables, consider exporting them to a comma- or tab-delimited file
> and then using a good text editor.
>
> Spreadsheets aren't web pages and vice versa; unless absolutely necessary,
> don't put very long tables into HTML.  Thanks to the continued brain-dead
> table rendering in current browsers, none of the major browsers is capable
> of showing any part of a table until it downloads and calculates the
> layout for the entire table.  You'll usually be better off using multiple
> tables or multiple pages, or both.
>
> If users need to interact with your table--for instance, by sorting on
> different columns--static HTML cannot help.  You will need some
> server-side script to handle that (unless a JavaScript wizard can help
> out, but that opens up other difficulties).
>
>
> Finally, you'll get more concrete answers to your questions if you post
> the URL for the page.
>
>
> Thomas Dowling
> OhioLINK - Ohio Library and Information Network
> tdowling at ohiolink.edu
>
>