3 ms·

This whole article is basically about using the wrong tool for the job which the author mentions directly: > Microsoft Word is an atrocious tool for Web writin

This whole article is basically about using the wrong tool for the job which the author mentions directly: > Microsoft Word is an atrocious tool for Web writing. Well yea. I dont think anyone will argue with that. > Then I copy-pasted that text into a website that revealed the hidden code my document was carrying. Here's a snippet: The author is complaining about the HTML that comes out of Word. Is it really a huge surprise that something as complicated as Word formatting doesn't come out clean when converted? >Word's idea of effective collaboration is its Track Changes feature, which makes an uneventful edit read like a color-coded transcript of an argument between the world's most narcissistic writer and the world's most pedantic and passive-aggressive copy editor. First of all, this is incorrect. In the latest version of Word, if you have files stored at a shared location you can collaborate by both editing the file directly like in Google Docs. Second, the Track Changes feature is awesome. It does exactly what it's meant to do. Any changes you make while tracking is the displayed. I dont understand what "world most pedantic and passive-aggressive copy editor" has anything to do with the tool, rather than the editor himself. > When I was writing a book, which required lots of alone time with a giant file—and lots of word-counting, which Microsoft is good at—I stuck with Word. Good for you.

Turing_Machine 15y ago
"Is it really a huge surprise that something as complicated as Word formatting doesn't come out clean when converted?" No, but it's a huge surprise to users that copying and pasting from Word into a completely different program (say, a rich text editor in a web browser) brings all that crap along. Unless it's pasting into another Word window, it should paste the plain text. There is absolutely no situation where pasting Word's pseudo-HTML into a non-Microsoft program is the right thing to do. As you mention, Word's formatting is hideously complex, so why even bother? It isn't going to work. Just paste the text.
- kooshball 15y ago
  From what I understand, the copy command will put some content into clipboard, then the paste command can be programmed to read that content and print or convert it accordingly. For example, if I copy some content with formatting from Word and paste it into Google Docs it will try to preserve the format. Is that expected behavior? I dont know, but that's how it's designed and I think that makes a lot of sense. If I have a table in Word why shouldn't I be able to copy that to Google Docs? I dont know enough about the clipboard programming to know if the program that calls copy can determine what comes out based on the paste program. Also, I think the garbage formatting lines in that article will never be shown to the user. That will only be shown if you try to look at the formatting directly or if you're reading the HTML.
  - Turing_Machine 15y ago
    I don't know about Google docs per se, but most rich text editors produce horribly broken results when Word's "HTML" is pasted in. Many of them have add-ons or special procedures to attempt to clean up the mess, but it's an iffy proposition at best.
- Elepsis 15y ago
  It's worth pointing out that for a _large_ number of users, the primary copy/paste flow from a Word document is into another Office application (quite often Outlook). The end result is that you end up with two common flows: * The program I'm pasting into is another Office app and supports (roughly) the same formatting, or * The program I'm pasting into is a very rudimentary text-handling program and will just look for the plain-text version of whatever was copied. Yes, there are a number of apps that fall into the uncanny valley by trying and failing to parse Office's output, but I suspect for most people this is a huge red herring. p.s. I'm a Microsoft employee, but I have nothing to do with how Office handles copy/paste. This is just my opinion.
  - Turing_Machine 15y ago
    "Yes, there are a number of apps that fall into the uncanny valley" "A number of apps" meaning "every textarea on the web with contenteditable set to true"? And it isn't "trying and failing to parse Office's output" -- it's more like "taking Office's word for it that the garbage on the clipboard is actually HTML, when it isn't".
- sopooneo 15y ago
  To both of your points, in the example from the article, the author is not describing how Word converts documents to HTML. He is describing the XML markup that the newer versions of Word use, and which can be carried along when you cut and paste text from Word.
  - Turing_Machine 15y ago
    Actual sample of what happens when you copy and paste from Word into an HTML editor: http://contraterrene.com/blog/?p=44 http://contraterrene.com/blog/?p=44
- random_ind_dude 15y ago
  When you copy some content from MS Word into the clipboard, it gets copied in a number of formats, including plain text. When you paste it to another application, it is for the application to choose which format to use from the clipboard. I think that the author tried to paste the content to GMail and GMail tried to preserve the original formatting and failed.
  - Turing_Machine 15y ago
    You're misunderstanding the problem. 1) You have a contenteditable region (or a rich text editor that otherwise can handle HTML). 2) User copies something from Word. One of the choices on the clipboard claims to be HTML. It isn't. It's pure garbage, understandable only to other Microsoft products. The rich text editor has two choices: disable pasting HTML altogether (even from within itself, or from another application that actually does put real HTML on the clipboard) or deal with the garbage that comes in from someone pasting from Word. The fundamental problem here is that Word puts garbage on the clipboard and lies about it, claiming that it's HTML.
- mappu 15y ago
  OLE, or whatever it's called these days, is magic - the other day, i set up a label printer and all the bundled programs it came with. I right-clicked to copy a jpeg in Chrome, hit paste in the label editor, without knowing if it would work - and it did. This is an image, going between a cross-platform Skia program and contracted fixed-function bundleware i'll never use twice, made by two completely different companies, and it... blew my mind a little. I have a resolved respect for the native platform capabilities. I mean, sure, it's just a tag in the clipboard code somewhere, but... fascinating. Anyways, the point of that was, coercing the data type down to the simplest format isn't always the right thing to do. Word should be able to paste formatted text into anything else that handles formatted text (you can paste word formatted text into TinyMCE, that's also pretty impressive)
  - maxerickson 15y ago
    It's pretty likely that your example case involved the two programs both using a standard clipboard format (a bitmap), not something more sophisticated.
  - Turing_Machine 15y ago
    What's actually impressive is the amount of work the TinyMCE folks have gone to in order to clean up the mess. Check out the source tree.
mturmon 15y ago
"Second, the Track Changes feature is awesome." I'd say that the track changes feature has a core of awesome that is made ugly by a really bad UX. The worst case is making a bunch of fine-grained changes to a page -- say, a collaborator with poor grammar. Each change shows up with its own fat bubble explaining who made the change and when. You do, as claimed in TFA, end up looking like an anal-retentive a-hole (e.g., switching commas inside quotes 10 times per page results in 10 fat bubbles explaining each change). I simply don't do fine-grained edits with Track Changes on, because I can't bear to see order of 50 change bubbles per page. Another problem with the track changes UX is iterated changes. You make a change, and then a change to that change (e.g., reword twice). Each one produces a bubble. Eventually you can't tell what the hell is going on. The owner of the document can choose to accept the changes piecemeal, which could result in chaos. You spend more effort trying to engineer a minimal set of changes than thinking about the content of the change.
- vcrash 15y ago
  I think that you can turn off the bubbles for different classes of changes, if you have to.
crazygringo 15y ago
> The author is complaining about the HTML that comes out of Word. Is it really a huge surprise that something as complicated as Word formatting doesn't come out clean when converted? It absolutely is a huge surprise. Word presumably uses its own internal format for copy/pasting within Word, and for copy/pasting in HTML format, it should strip everything down to a few minimal tags like <b>, <i> and such. That would be the logical, obvious and useful solution.

Turing_Machine 15y ago

"Is it really a huge surprise that something as complicated as Word formatting doesn't come out clean when converted?" No, but it's a huge surprise to users that copying and pasting from Word into a completely different program (say, a rich text editor in a web browser) brings all that crap along. Unless it's pasting into another Word window, it should paste the plain text. There is absolutely no situation where pasting Word's pseudo-HTML into a non-Microsoft program is the right thing to do. As you mention, Word's formatting is hideously complex, so why even bother? It isn't going to work. Just paste the text.

kooshball 15y ago
From what I understand, the copy command will put some content into clipboard, then the paste command can be programmed to read that content and print or convert it accordingly. For example, if I copy some content with formatting from Word and paste it into Google Docs it will try to preserve the format. Is that expected behavior? I dont know, but that's how it's designed and I think that makes a lot of sense. If I have a table in Word why shouldn't I be able to copy that to Google Docs? I dont know enough about the clipboard programming to know if the program that calls copy can determine what comes out based on the paste program. Also, I think the garbage formatting lines in that article will never be shown to the user. That will only be shown if you try to look at the formatting directly or if you're reading the HTML.
- Turing_Machine 15y ago
  I don't know about Google docs per se, but most rich text editors produce horribly broken results when Word's "HTML" is pasted in. Many of them have add-ons or special procedures to attempt to clean up the mess, but it's an iffy proposition at best.
Elepsis 15y ago
It's worth pointing out that for a _large_ number of users, the primary copy/paste flow from a Word document is into another Office application (quite often Outlook). The end result is that you end up with two common flows: * The program I'm pasting into is another Office app and supports (roughly) the same formatting, or * The program I'm pasting into is a very rudimentary text-handling program and will just look for the plain-text version of whatever was copied. Yes, there are a number of apps that fall into the uncanny valley by trying and failing to parse Office's output, but I suspect for most people this is a huge red herring. p.s. I'm a Microsoft employee, but I have nothing to do with how Office handles copy/paste. This is just my opinion.
- Turing_Machine 15y ago
  "Yes, there are a number of apps that fall into the uncanny valley" "A number of apps" meaning "every textarea on the web with contenteditable set to true"? And it isn't "trying and failing to parse Office's output" -- it's more like "taking Office's word for it that the garbage on the clipboard is actually HTML, when it isn't".
sopooneo 15y ago
To both of your points, in the example from the article, the author is not describing how Word converts documents to HTML. He is describing the XML markup that the newer versions of Word use, and which can be carried along when you cut and paste text from Word.
- Turing_Machine 15y ago
  Actual sample of what happens when you copy and paste from Word into an HTML editor: http://contraterrene.com/blog/?p=44 http://contraterrene.com/blog/?p=44
random_ind_dude 15y ago
When you copy some content from MS Word into the clipboard, it gets copied in a number of formats, including plain text. When you paste it to another application, it is for the application to choose which format to use from the clipboard. I think that the author tried to paste the content to GMail and GMail tried to preserve the original formatting and failed.
- Turing_Machine 15y ago
  You're misunderstanding the problem. 1) You have a contenteditable region (or a rich text editor that otherwise can handle HTML). 2) User copies something from Word. One of the choices on the clipboard claims to be HTML. It isn't. It's pure garbage, understandable only to other Microsoft products. The rich text editor has two choices: disable pasting HTML altogether (even from within itself, or from another application that actually does put real HTML on the clipboard) or deal with the garbage that comes in from someone pasting from Word. The fundamental problem here is that Word puts garbage on the clipboard and lies about it, claiming that it's HTML.
mappu 15y ago
OLE, or whatever it's called these days, is magic - the other day, i set up a label printer and all the bundled programs it came with. I right-clicked to copy a jpeg in Chrome, hit paste in the label editor, without knowing if it would work - and it did. This is an image, going between a cross-platform Skia program and contracted fixed-function bundleware i'll never use twice, made by two completely different companies, and it... blew my mind a little. I have a resolved respect for the native platform capabilities. I mean, sure, it's just a tag in the clipboard code somewhere, but... fascinating. Anyways, the point of that was, coercing the data type down to the simplest format isn't always the right thing to do. Word should be able to paste formatted text into anything else that handles formatted text (you can paste word formatted text into TinyMCE, that's also pretty impressive)
- maxerickson 15y ago
  It's pretty likely that your example case involved the two programs both using a standard clipboard format (a bitmap), not something more sophisticated.
- Turing_Machine 15y ago
  What's actually impressive is the amount of work the TinyMCE folks have gone to in order to clean up the mess. Check out the source tree.

mturmon 15y ago

"Second, the Track Changes feature is awesome." I'd say that the track changes feature has a core of awesome that is made ugly by a really bad UX. The worst case is making a bunch of fine-grained changes to a page -- say, a collaborator with poor grammar. Each change shows up with its own fat bubble explaining who made the change and when. You do, as claimed in TFA, end up looking like an anal-retentive a-hole (e.g., switching commas inside quotes 10 times per page results in 10 fat bubbles explaining each change). I simply don't do fine-grained edits with Track Changes on, because I can't bear to see order of 50 change bubbles per page. Another problem with the track changes UX is iterated changes. You make a change, and then a change to that change (e.g., reword twice). Each one produces a bubble. Eventually you can't tell what the hell is going on. The owner of the document can choose to accept the changes piecemeal, which could result in chaos. You spend more effort trying to engineer a minimal set of changes than thinking about the content of the change.

vcrash 15y ago
I think that you can turn off the bubbles for different classes of changes, if you have to.

crazygringo 15y ago

> The author is complaining about the HTML that comes out of Word. Is it really a huge surprise that something as complicated as Word formatting doesn't come out clean when converted? It absolutely is a huge surprise. Word presumably uses its own internal format for copy/pasting within Word, and for copy/pasting in HTML format, it should strip everything down to a few minimal tags like <b>, <i> and such. That would be the logical, obvious and useful solution.