[Dixielandjazz] Creating websites

[Bigbuttbnd at aol.com]

John (and others):

Word and most commercial word processors have invisible control codes they 
place within the text. These codes and charcters do not show up when viewing a 
document in Word or even if you copy and paste the text into other word 
processors.... most know what characters should be displayed and what characters are 
'control codes' and should be ignored. HTML (the coding language of the 
internet), however, is a very LITERAL text-based coding language and ignores 
nothing. When it encounters those heretofore "invisible" characters from Word it 
tries to do something with them... and that something is most often disasterous to 
a web page!

Instead... use a simple text program like Notepad on the PC or SimpleText on 
a Mac to write your HTML. These programs are so vanilla that they do not 
include the "invisible" characters that are rampant in Word.

If you aren't up to creating HTML in a text-only format (what programmers 
would call 'hard-coding') then look into getting a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What 
You Get) HTML editor that acts like a page layout program... the best are 
DreamWeaver from Macromedia and GoLive from Adobe. Microsoft makes one that most 
web pros HATE called "FrontPage". Adobe made one that can often still be found 
cheap called PageMill. Netscape used to give away a free one with Netscape 
Communicator 3.0 through about 4.7 called "Composer" (built right into the 
browser). Go to www.versiontracker.com to see if there are any freeware or shareware 
software html editors that will do the same thing on your Operating System.

In short, any word processor (and ESPECIALLY Word) contains far too many 
invisible characters hidden among the text that drive your browser crazy when it 
tries to interpret the code to display the page and its contents (graphic 
files) accurately. It's not a 'bug' in Word 2000... it's just a case of using the 
wrong tool for the job.

Hope this helps,
Rocky Ball, banjo
Atlanta, Georgia