Publisher 98 Web Page Building

[James Greenwood]

I am in Year 9 at school, and my class were set the task of making a
single Web page about quite a famous author and playwright called R.
C. Sherriff (he wrote Journey's End - a play about trench life in
World War One - which was a West End hit).

The computers in our I.T. Department currently run Microsoft Windows
NT 4.0 with various service packs and updates. The system setup is
quite common to the West Midlands schools, specifically those in the
Telford & Wrekin area of the UK.

Anyway, each computer has a preloaded version of Office 97 and
Publisher 98. I am quite experienced with computers (having one since
I was 8, learning to touch type quickly and programming using QBASIC
and C++), and noticed that there was no "real" software for us to use
to make Web pages. OK, OK, there was Word and Publisher - however,
these would produce unnecessary gabble: which is what I'm about to get
to.

Publisher 98, which is what most people in my class used to produce
their Web page, is (in my opinion) pathetically poor at creating Web
sites and Web pages. The hyperlink "feature" of the program sometimes
barely works - I know, I know, there's probably an "update" to fix
this... - and instead of actually writing the page in good ol' HTML it
makes a BIG picture of it and slaps it onto the page!

For example, my friend's site (at http://www.geocities.com/rcsherriff)
is all made of pictures - and the main text and document is a total of
42KB in size! Also, this would not be compatible with a lot of old
browsers or, more specifically, text browsers. So, to finish off, I
would just like to say how appalled I am at Microsoft's (maybe old)
attempt to transform Publisher into a piece of Web design software.
Anyone disagree?

 

[Ed Bennett]

Whilst attempting to develop brick-based storage technology, Ed reads a

Publisher 98, which is what most people in my class used to produce
their Web page, is (in my opinion) pathetically poor at creating Web
sites and Web pages. The hyperlink "feature" of the program sometimes
barely works - I know, I know, there's probably an "update" to fix
this... - and instead of actually writing the page in good ol' HTML it
makes a BIG picture of it and slaps it onto the page!

a) This is Publisher 98. 2003 is due for release soon (although it makes
even bigger and less standardised code than 98)
b) Consider yourself lucky - we have Windows 95 and Publisher 97 at our
school
c) Publisher is a DTP application. It is not intelligent enough to do
sensitive creation of web pages to a specific user's requirements from an
artist's impression-type thing on screen with proper HTML, so it creates
images instead.