Using WordProcessingML to Generate Clean HTML from Word

Generating clean and simple HTML output from Microsoft Word is very difficult if you rely on its "Save As Web Page" feature. In my InformIT article, Using WordProcessingML to Generate Clean HTML from Word, I'm describing how you can use WordProcessingML together with XSL transformations to generate clean, strict (X)HTML-compliant documents from Word sources.

MSXML is still only DOM-1 compliant

If you use DOM calls to manipulate XML documents returned with XMLHttpRequest object (and who doesn't), you'll be sooner or later highly upset when the code you've tested on Firefox or Opera fails in IE (including IE7). The reason - Microsoft still did not implement Node.getElementById function. So here's the "replacement":

function getDomById(e,id) {
  if (e.getElementById) { return e.getElementById(id); }
  if (e.documentElement) e = e.documentElement;
  
  var cn = e.childNodes;
  for (var i = 0 ; i != cn.length; i++) {
    var n = cn[i]; 
    if (n.nodeType == 1) {
      if (n.getAttribute("id") == id) return n ;
    }
  }
  for (var i = 0 ; i != cn.length; i++) {
    var n = cn[i]; 
    if (n.nodeType == 1) {
      var result = getDomById(n,id); if (result) return result;
    }
  }
  return false;
}

Note: The procedure is doing breadth-first search as I was looking for IDs that were pretty high in the hierarchy of trees with many branches.

Make Pop-Up Windows Visible to Search Engines

In the InformIT article Make Pop-Up Windows Visible to Search Engines I'm describing how you can make content in pop-up windows visible to search engines and accessible to visitors without JavaScript support.

Optimized presentation of XML content

In the Inform-IT article Optimized Presentation of XML Content I'm describing how you can serve XML content in its raw form to XSLT-compliant browsers (which do the transformation into HTML locally) while generating HTML pages from the same content for non-XSLT browsers (for example, early releases of Opera) and the search engines.