Microsoft Word Is Not A HTML Publishing Tool

You’d think it would be obvious given the number of people looking for ways to clean up Word’s so called HTML output to make it look something like HTML, but apparently Google failed to google it.  Good work guys.

So the new Blogger Word plugin is going to result in a whole ton of really, really, really bad HTML being published to the internet (in addition to the current volumes of it).  Sigh, and we had been making progress….

More importantly, even given the fact that most people are already familiar with Word, using Word plugins and macros to provide and interface and managing content within word is generally hated by users who have to use it.  I know because I happen to develop software (featuring a clean up Word HTML feature no less) that replaces that mess for a living and it never ceases to amaze me how much people hate using Word with external systems.  Mostly I see this with content management systems but I’d expect the same problems with blogs since they’re just an extremely primitive form of content repository (which is a good thing – it gives them simplicity).

As always the greatest issue with trying to use Word is deployment, just check out the FAQ.  For a consumer level app this will probably work out okay but it will cost them a bunch of users and frustrate a lot of others.

(via Scoble)