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Elna Tymes wondered <<Is there any package around that
translates from something into really accurate HTML?>>
I've _heard_ good things about "HTML Transit", but have no
firsthand experience with it. I've _read_ very good things
about "Dreamweaver" as an authoring tool, since (among
other things) it has good validity checking for various
browser versions and doesn't do anything to the code behind
your back; again, no firsthand experience.
The biggest problem with creating HTML from desktop
publishing or wordpro files is that it's equivalent to producing
a "final layout" in Word, then importing it into Frame or
PageMaker or Quark and expecting all that layout work to be
preserved: it simply isn't going to happen. It's also easy to
create print-based layouts that you can't emulate in HTML
other than through tables and frames, and converting these
types of ornate formats between DTP and HTML is tough
enough that almonst nobody gets the job done reliably. My
feel for this is that the best work flow given the current crop
of tools is that you should either generate your HTML from
scratch in the authoring tool, or create a very simple, linear
file in your wordpro and apply all formatting only once
you've imported the file into the authoring tool.
<<Can you trust anything to do a really accurate translation?
Or are you better off creating your text in one of the HTML
creation packages?>>
All the code geeks I've talked to (or read interviews with)
claim that the main authoring packages are solely for
prototyping, and that "real" Web developers dive into the file
with a text editor and tweak it by hand to suit their standards.
Leaving aside the standard rhetoric ("yeah, but you're a
developer, and thus your opinion is worthless") for a moment,
there's a certain amount of justice to that opinion.
