Cleaning Word HTML · 10 November 2003
I took a weekend off from scowling and screaming at the content management system that refuses to be born in order to luxuriate in code that has to work on only one server, and has to be legible only to me. The bliss, I tell you, the bliss!
The result is a rather if-I-may skookum rewrite of this site’s Word HTML Cleaner. The markup it now produces is tidier and easier to read, and the selection of tags and attributes that make it through the cleaning process is somewhat more sensible.
Access to the Word Cleaner continues to be free for files up to 20 kilobytes, though I’ve added an option to subscribe at the ROCK BOTTOM INTRODUCTORY PRICE of $20 per year.
Subscribers can, in addition to working with documents larger than 20 Kb, customise how the cleaner deals with tag attributes, as well as have access to other future improvements. Thanks to a bit of hacking through Paypal’s rather suave Instant Payment Notification API, access to the Word cleaner’s new bells and whistles is nearly instant.
Whether this will slow down the instances of people firing up 2 megabyte quarterly reports overflowing with WordArt and Excel charts – then sniffily demanding why this free service didn’t work (‘oh was I supposed to save it as HTML?’) – remains to be seen.
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