Why not use styles for blogging in Word 2007 and really leap the chasm

What a shame it is that some of the bestest geeks use Emacs. Off the top of my head, blogs I am subscribed to include those written by Emacs users Norm Walsh and Tim Bray. I bet there are lots of others. I've used this quote from Tim Bray before:

Geeks like me are fine with writing in Emacs, but lots of people seem to like writing in word processors,

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/03/26/OpenOffice

Why is it a shame they use Emacs? 'Cos if they wrote using word processors like OpenOffice.org Writer or Microsoft Word then there would be good ways to use those word processors to create HTML.

Another favourite blogger, who's more of a journalist than the other two is Jon Udell. He uses Emacs too, but he's also thinking about the other 99.9999% of the world. Recently he wrote about Blogging with Microsoft Word 2003, crossing the chasm.

Jon's latest piece is about metadata and doesn't mention the word style once, but I know that he understands the value of styles.

Last year, when Microsoft were talking about the new blogging feature in Word 2007 I tried, via Brian Wilson's blog to get a conversation started about styles in Word, and how a standard set of styles for common formatting in Word could really, really improve their HTML export. Not just for blogging but for 'Save as web page...' as well. I was frustrated that this blogging feature was seen as quite separate from general web export, that Word doesn't come with a single template with a decent comprehensive HTML compatible stylesheet, and that nobody had the time to explain why Word has three different ways of expressingstyle on a list item (same problems over at Sun, re OpenOffice.org).

Word could so easily ship with a 'use HTML compatible styles' mode, that turned off all the formatting buttons and had a nice clean interface that only did HTML exportable things, all using styles. I know this, because I can do this with Word, although for short documents I usually fly NeoOffice.

In Word at at the moment saving as HTML will turn Heading 1 into an h1 element, Heading 2 into an h2 element and for the rest, your guess is as good as mine. Some formatting choices will result in nice(ish) HTML others will be horrific, or worse. Sadly, using Styles, which is generally considered to be A Good Thing in word processing doesn't buy you anything unless you have a bit of custom software, like, um, say, ICE.

Also last year Jon Udell was kind enough to say, about ICE:

Peter Sefton has integrated Slidyinto the University of Southern Queensland's ICE courseware system. ICE, by the way, is a noteworthy example of how wordprocessor stylesheets -- for OpenOffice.org and MS Word -- can provide the integration glue for single-source and multi-output content management.

http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2006/05/23.html

Noteworthy!  Jon Udell said that ICE is noteworthy! (Ron Ward, Daniel de Byl and Pamela Glossop did the integration, I just proved the concept.)

So, Jon Udell, who is now working for Microsoft, recognizes that stylesheets can provide the glue for multi-output content management. He describes his new work on manipulating Word 2007 files:

To that end, I’m developing some Python code to help me wrangle Word’s default .docx format, which is a zip file containing the document in WordML and a bunch of other stuff. At the end of this entry you can see what I’ve got so far. I’m using this code to explore what kind of XML I can inject programmatically into a Word 2007 document, what kind comes back after a round trip through the application, how that XML relates to the HTML that gets published to WordPress, and which of these representations will be the canonical one that I’ll want to store and process.

And Jon Udell notes formatting problems:

Note: There will be formatting problems in this HTML rendering which, for now, painful though it is, I am not going to try to fix by hacking around in the WordPress editor.

Here's an idea. ICE has a set of styles which are designed to map to HTML.  ICE has a bit of Python code, with quite a few tests, that does ODF -> HTML, making it possible to write HTML using not just Word 2007, but basically any word processor with styles. Would anyone care to adapt it to use Word's OOXML? Wouldn't be hard, as it really only needs to work with paragraphs, spans and style-names; the hard work on a state-machine framework to drive the transformation is already done. Thanks Ron Ward. (There's also some legacy XSLT code that could be adapted, but it has performance problems and a couple of long standing bugs and it's hard to maintain.)

And the ICE style names are just one set. If Microsoft or Sun, or preferably both, backed a differently named set that did the same job we'd adapt instantly.

We chose short names, like h1, h1n, li1b, pre1, bq1 so they' d be easy for style-geeks to type if they needed to, but we do provide a non-geek accessible menu, which is soon to be improved.

We chose short names so they would show up in the left margin of the page in Word's Normal view.

We chose short names that are easy for machines to parse so we could automate HTML and other conversion.

We chose style names that are not part of the meager set of semi-default styles that ship with word processors and we chose to make all other styles in Word go RED, to help with document conversion.