Cindy had an experience while teaching one of her classes that gave me an idea for a demonstration. She was working with pre-service teachers creating simple web pages and experienced some “issues” while trying to work back and forth creating web pages with multiple programs.
Her students were generating web pages by converting a Word document into HTML. At some point, they wanted to tweak the page that was generated and they opened this document in Netscape Composer. After saving the changes, they loaded their pages to the server and then attempted to view the pages in Internet Explorer on Windows machines.
Here is a screen image of what they encountered (this my approximation of the process). If you view this same material on a Mac, my experience has been you do not necessarily see these same abnormalities. Version “Web page created by opening Word HTML document and saving using Composer” that appears below is the corrupted version.
I started experimenting with this same process and generated the following options. I would encourage students to create a similar set of “experiments” to evaluate some of these same issues.
Web page created by saving Word document in HTML
Web page created by opening Word HTML document and saving using Composer
Word HTML page resaved using FrontPage
HTML page generated by AppleWorks
AppleWorks HTML resaved in Composer
My Point? I do not like the approach taken by Microsoft products. The code appears to create some compatibility problems (easy to see if you view these examples from a Windows machine and IE) and the code is overly complex (view the source code). Why would this be a desirable approach? Beats me. If you feel my analysis is unfair, please feel to respond.
