Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
The politest way I can comment is HELLS NO. I find it godawful.
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That pretty much sums up Apple's HTML output in general. It is *technically* HTML and CSS, but it is so far from proper semantic markup that every time someone uses it, God kills a kitten.
There's a right way and a wrong way to construct content for HTML output. The right way is to actually edit HTML natively under the hood, or at least semantic XML. The wrong way is to do basically anything else. Guess which one Pages does?
Basically, the output from Pages looks like what would happen if you started out with attributed strings—a string where each character has a set of styles—and then try to turn that into a pile of span tags, and every time you see a different combination of attributes, you create a new span class.
It's what happens when you write code with the intent of emitting printed matter, and then you try to shoehorn in rudimentary HTML output that is technically correct, but utterly unreadable by humans and completely unusable as an input to any transformative process.
And if you're really lucky, every tag is an h1 tag. No, I'm not kidding. I wish I were.
But still, it is arguably slightly better than their previous attempts. AppleWorks didn't even try to emit balanced tags when it converted attributed strings to HTML, so you'd have <p>Blah <b>blah <i>blah</b> blah.</p><p></i>Blah.</p> At least Pages emits technically valid HTML, albeit some of the worst valid HTML I've ever seen in a product not made by Microsoft....