Word 2007’s Blogging Issues

Following our article about Word 2007 introducing a fairly powerful desktop blogging client that actually produces clean code, it turned out most bloggers didn’t care so much for the client part as much as they did about whether or not it was 100% XHTML compliant.

From what we’ve been able to piece together, the Word 2007 blogging tool outputs XHTML 1.1 compliant code almost all of the time (we have yet to see it break, but nothing is bulletproof), with one (rather important) exception: it doesn’t know encoding!

Word 2007 can format the text, add the tags, embed the display settings, and do quite a lot more without trouble, but throw at it the first unicode character you come across and it doesn’t just stumble, it topples!

What Word 2007 does is apply the styling via XHTML, but doesn’t touch the content, and therein lies the problem. In Word, no one writes things XHTML style, for example, you don’t write “&nbsp,” you write “ “ and that’s it. Word doesn’t bother checking for code-breaking characters, it instead takes whatever it is that your wrote, puts it in the appropriate tags, and ships it off to the XML RPC Server on your Blog.

This is quite a serious problem, after all, no post is complete without a couple of quotation marks at the very least, followed by a copyright sign, and a couple other non-standard characters that will mess up the way your post displays.

However, Word 2007 still is in Beta, it’s come a long way, and we really like where it’s headed… And no matter what desktop blogging client you choose, remember Einstein said it best:

“Computers are incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid; humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate, and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond imagination.”

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