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Re: PPT to clean HTML

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From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Dec 14, 2004 4:40PM

On Tue, 14 Dec 2004, glenda wrote:

> Anyone know of a quick way to convert powerpoint presentations into clean
> HTML? I tried the simple 'save as html', but there is all the MS Office
> styles I don't want.

Using HTML Kit would probably help to get rid of it, though it's not
perfect.

But the real problem is: if you could automatically convert a PowerPoint
presentation into a good, Web-friendly HTML document, then it was a really
lousy presentation - like my presentations used to be! A PowerPoint
presentation should be very concise, showing mostly just the key words,
acting as an aid to understanding the spoken (and gestured) presentation.
It's not meant to be readable in isolation, as standalone material.
To convert it to a Web page, you would normally need to _minimally_
change most of the presentation's content into subheadings and add at
least a sentence or two below each of them. This is hard work.

> Also, while I'm here, I have an ALT that has English and French, ie a
> Government of Canada department logo. How do I indicate the change in
> LANG???

You don't. Language changes cannot be indicated inside attribute values,
since they are pure text. (Well, Unicode has "language tag characters",
but nobody wants to use them, and they surely would not improve
accessibility.)

On the other hand, why would you write a bilingual alt text? The page
where the logo appears is either in English or in French, so the alt text
should use that language, e.g. alt="Government of Canada, department of
silly walks.". Bilingual pages should be avoided, but admittedly some
pages more or less need to be bilingual, e.g. a page for selecting
language (in cases where automatic language negotiation has failed).
If you wish to follow the letter of WAI recommendations (much more than
WAI itself does), you could use a little trick: use the logo image,
say logo.gif, and a dummy image (transparent single-pixel gif), say
dummy.gif, and write
<img src="logo.gif" lang="en" alt"Government of Canada, department of silly walks - "><img
src="dummy.gif" lang="fr" alt"Gouvernement du Canada, d&eacute;partement des promenades amusantes.">

I don't know whether any browser actually utitilizes the lang attribute
for an img element, but technically that attribute does specify, by
definition, the language of the attribute values. (There's a statement in
official Finnish rules for public sites that claims that alt attributes
are of no use unless their language is declared with lang attributes.
That's of course complete nonsense. Just a reminder: we should
_expect_ people who write accessibility policies to write them without
understanding how things work.)

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/