For my first attempt at making my recent Web page (relspace.astahost.com), I tried Microsoft Office Publisher since I got a copy for free with the Office Suite that was provided for my teaching job. The result would load like it was slowly putting together a jigsaw puzzle. Not only that, but sometimes it would not load properly in the browser at all.

So I rewrote the thing in freehand html (using the same graphics that Publisher had supplied) and I was rather shocked that the Publisher version of the html was 100 times the size of what I wrote to do the same thing. I find that a little bit incomprehensible. Why would anyone bother writing a program to make an html document 100 times larger so that it could perform so lousy when loading?

Well maybe no one with any experience doing web pages would bother with a program like Publisher. In this field I am quite a novice. I am more into software programming. But it really make wonder about the people who wrote Publisher. I didn't realize that there were salespeople pretending to be programmers or something. I don't know, my imagination fails me here!

I think that's the point. MS Publisher is not a website editor. It CAN be used to create HTML-files, but the source code is much too heavy. Same thing with MS Word. Publisher sure is easy to use and you get good looking results, but programs like Frontpage or Dreamweaver woul do a better job. Publisher is for printed publications I guess, isn't it? (I'm not so sure)

GreetingZ

Microsoft Publisher is used for desktop publishing, that is, printed publications like posters, signs, ads, flyers, greeting cards, etc.

It uses a rather verbose HTML generator, also called MSHTML. It generates the HTML so that when you reopen it in Microsoft Publisher, you get exactly the same results.

I agree that using human-generated XHTML is the way to go. Sure you can use any program you want to do your graphics (as long as you have permission to use those graphics), but using human-generated XHTML guarantees much cleaner code and you can actually go to revise it if necessary.