I’ve spent a fair amount of time recently marveling over Microsoft Word’s complete inability to generate clean xHTML, or even clean HTML for that matter. It is the year 2004 after all — you would think a company with Microsoft’s resources would be able to figure this stuff out.

Microsoft’s latest offering, Word 2003, features the ability to export to numerous formats including XML and two varieties of HTML (filtered and regular). I have to admit that I held out some small hope that ‘filtered’ would produce the sort of clean code we’ve all been waiting for. No luck, the resulting HTML still included embeded ‘mso’ class references on every element. I can understand, and even appreciate, the applications attempt to generate a document specific stylesheet. I’d appreciate it even more if I could turn that ‘feature’ off.
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