Date: Wed, 24 Dec 2003 13:57:51 -0500 (EST)
From: "Keith F. Lynch" <kfl at KeithLynch.net>
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: The December 2003 WSFA Journal is available online
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>

"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*.

If only I knew what all that undocumented stuff did, I'm sure I could
remove more than half of it, making the online WSFA Journals smaller,
faster to load, and more pleasant to read.

I could create multiple versions of a recent Journal as a test, if
someone were to volunteer to look at the multiple versions using a
graphical browser and report back.
--
Keith F. Lynch - kfl at keithlynch.net - http://keithlynch.net/
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