Forcing FrontPage to generate valid markup

Again this is mostly for my own benefit. Years ago, when I worked at the Company That Shall Not Be Named, I started using FrontPage simply because I didn’t know any better.

Go ahead, laugh! We all had to start somewhere. I’m sure you weren’t born spouting regular expressions and shell scripts either, weenie.

Anyway, in the middle of 1998, thanks to some inspiring articles by Web design gurus, I began to learn better. I started using all sorts of outside tools (perl-based page assembly scripts, Funduc’s SR, TidyGUI, Liam Quinn’s ARV, etc.) to correct the garbage that FrontPage and Word called markup. As the iterations of FrontPage advanced, I became very able at cleaning up the messes it made. FrontPage is terribly, tragically broken, but at least it breaks markup in a consistent way, which means it’s fixable.

Now a Dane, by the name of Michael Suodenjoki, has written some VBA code that forces FrontPage to generate valid XHTML. I just wish I’d seen this page a year ago before I commented at WDIK.

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