Date: Wed, 24 Dec 2003 12:05:52 -0800 (PST)
From: Rich Lynch <rw_lynch at yahoo.com>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: The December 2003 WSFA Journal is available online
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>

--- "Keith F. Lynch" <kfl at KeithLynch.net> wrote:
> "Keith F. Lynch" <kfl at KeithLynch.net> wrote:
> > (Does anyone know what "MsoNormal" means?  It's not
> part of the
> > official HTML spec, but it appears over fifteen
> *thousand* times in
> > the online WSFA Journals, often several times per line
> of text.)
>
> Elspeth Kovar <ekovar at worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> > I don't know HTML but a quick Google seems to indicate
> that Sam is
> > using Microsoft Word to generate the code.  MsoNormal
> seems to mean
> > to set something back to Microsoft Office Normal, that
> is, whatever
> > Sam has as the standard.  Thus if he was doing
> something in bold
> > that text might then be followed by [something]
> MsoNormal to turn
> > it back to regular text.
>
> It's unGoogleable.  Sure, Google will find lots of pages
> containing
> that "word", but always being *used*, not defined.  And
> apparently
> nobody ever deliberately uses it.  It's always generated
> by software.
> It's definitely not part of any published HTML
> specification.  All I
> can tell for certain is that it first appeared five years
> ago this
> week, without explanation or discussion.
>
> Bold is always turned on with <b>, and off with </b>.
> Similarly with
> other attributes such as underlined text, italics,
> variant fonts, etc.
> As far as I've been able to tell, "MsoNormal" does
> *nothing*.
>

Not quite un-Google-able:
http://www-db.stanford.edu/pub/gio/CS99I/html-inf.html
It's a "Microsoft default" setting that comes into play
whenever MSWord programs are auto-converted by MSWord into
HTML.  Supposedly this allows the conversion to faithfully
capture the appearance of the document for web viewing
(ha!), but in actuality, it's just more spaghetti code.

If you want to clean up the coding, the easiest way is to
copy the text into notepad, which will get rid of all
spaghetti code formatting.  You'll have to re-format the
text with indents and paragraph breaks, and also re-code
any images, then re-save and re-upload.  WSFA Journals are
not complex documents, though, and this won't be rocket
science to do.  (Probably about 10-15 minutes per issue.)

=====
Rich Lynch
==========
MIMOSA web site: http://jophan.org/mimosa/
1960s Fan History Site: http://jophan.org/1960s/
http://www.livejournal.com/~rwl

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