“Clean XHTML for Word 2003” Not Needed?
The more thoughts go by the more I see that a tool like “Clean XHTML for Word 2003” (the possible sequel to Clean HTML for Word 2000/2002) would only be needed to automate the tagging process of a Word 2003 document. Because once the schema is properly applied, it is only a matter of a few lines of code running through Selection.Range.XMLNodes to export XHTML. I don’t see making a big commercial deal out of that.
By the way, there was the idea that all I had to do was get a return value from Selection.Range.XML(True) but this will fire an error when the Selection contains a fragment of XHTML that is not well formed.
So a tool like Clean XHTML would only help users apply XHTML elements through extremely complicated procedures depending heavily on intimate, ongoing knowledge of the Word Object model. Today, I cannot believe that the good people at Microsoft will not improve the Find/Change functionality (to include mapping Word styles to XML elements) in a release in the near future. I do recognize that XML might be kept in the context of “pure” data so mapping XML elements to styles would then be considered stupid—or at best an obscure workaround for an obscure problem.