Date: Wed, 24 Dec 2003 19:36:05 -0500
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>
From: Elspeth Kovar <ekovar at worldnet.att.net>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: The December 2003 WSFA Journal is available
  online
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>

At 03:05 PM 12/24/03, Rich Lynch wrote:

>--- "Keith F. Lynch" <kfl at KeithLynch.net> wrote:
> >
> > 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.

<snip>

>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.

And, um, Keith?  If it were un-Google-able why would I have said I'd
Googled it?  What I did was to look for pages that were discussing code and
thus had code as text, then read the code to try to figure it out.  But
Rich has better answered the question -- and when writing I drew a blank of
the word 'default' and had to use 'standard' instead.

Elspeth