Conversion tools

While it is perfectly possible to create documents using HTML alone, other document preparation systems may be more appropriate. Perhaps you already have a large number of documents in a particular word processing format, or in a desktop publishing system format, which you would like to make available on the Web. In order to do so they will need to be converted to the HTML format. There are various conversion tools that can be used to automate this process.

Even where documents are being created from scratch it can make sense to use a document preparation system other than HTML. The primary purpose of HTML is to deliver documents over the Net. If such documents are very large or complex they might be more usefully written in SGML, the logical markup language par excellence. As mentioned in Chapter , HTML can be regarded as a subset of SGML (a conforming application) and SGML is a highly sophisticated, complete system for describing document types. It is much richer than HTML in its capacity to classify document contents and, where tools are available to use it to its full capacity, having a document written in SGML greatly enhances its usefulness by providing features such as intelligent indexing. When documents are converted from SGML to HTML some of these sophisticated features are lost, given the current state of HTML, but projected enhancements are expected to make more SGML features available within HTML in the near future.

The Web is capable of delivering documents in formats other than HTML, which may render conversion unnecessary. The document type is identified in the header information and all browsers can use this information to start another application, for example a PostScript viewer, assuming that it is available.

Where documents are created in a format other than HTML and it has been decided to convert them, the conversion really needs to be automated. There are several conversion utilities, both commercial and free, for most of the common document preparation systems. When an original document is altered, it will of course be necessary to update the HTML. This process can itself sometimes be automated depending on the operating system in use.

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[ITCP] Spinning the Web by Andrew Ford
© 1995 International Thomson Publishing
© 2002 Andrew Ford and Ford & Mason Ltd
Note: this HTML document was generated in December 1994 directly from the LaTeX source files using LaTeX2HTML. It was formatted into our standard page layout using the Template Toolkit. The document is mainly of historical interest as obviously many of the sites mentioned have long since disappeared.