Cleaning Up After Your HTML Editor

Although you can create and edit HTML/XHTML documents with a text editor, such as vi or Notepad, most HTML authors use an application that is designed for creating web pages—several are free of charge, many offer a free evaluation period, and most are available for download over the Web. Be forewarned, though; in our experience, you will rarely (if ever) be able to create a web document from one of these editors without having to inspect, add to, edit, and sometimes even repair the source HTML that the editor generates. The following sections discuss a few things that you should know about and watch out for.

Where Did My Document Go?

One of the first things you will notice is that many of the HTML editors automatically introduce into your document markup that you did not explicitly select or write. Remember this very simple HTML document that we started with in Chapter 2?

<html>
<head>
<title>My first HTML document</title>
</head>
<body>
<h2>My first HTML document</h2>
Hello, <i>World Wide Web!</i>
 <!-- No "Hello, World" for us -->
<p>
Greetings from<br>
<a href="http://www.ora.com">O'Reilly Media</a>
<p>
Composed with care by:
<cite>(insert your name here)</cite>
<br>&copy;2000 and beyond
</body>
</html>

Here is what the source looks like after you load it into Microsoft Word from Office XP:

<html xmlns:o="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" xmlns:w="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:word" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40"> <head> <meta ...

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