I was just saving a document i had written in Word as an HTML file and I could not believe how big it became with verbose declarations, so I just tried a quick test. I created a new file and typed 3 lines of text comprising 54 characters, then I saved as web page ….
The resulting file is 24,947 bytes with as you would expect 24,947 characters in 552 lines of code!
Its truly amazing how much code is inserted around my 54 characters of text complete with information about the registered user and orgainisation and author. Look at this block which is actually commented out in the doc but still there absorbing space;
<!–[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<o 
ocumentProperties>
<o:Author>Tim Carmichael</o:Author>
<o:Template>Normal</o:Template>
<o:LastAuthor>Tim Carmichael</o:LastAuthor>
<o:Revision>1</o:Revision>
<o:TotalTime>8</o:TotalTime>
<o:Created>2007-10-11T20:47:00Z</o:Created>
<o:LastSaved>2007-10-11T20:55:00Z</o:LastSaved>
<o 
ages>1</o ages>
<o:Words>9</o:Words>
<o:Characters>57</o:Characters>
<o:Company>altaVENTE</o:Company>
<o:Lines>1</o:Lines>
<o aragraphs>1</o aragraphs>
<o:CharactersWithSpaces>65</o:CharactersWithSpaces>
<o:Version>12.00</o:Version>
</o ocumentProperties>
</xml><![endif]–>
Obviously this info is useful from a document management perspective but useless at runtime and potentially embarassing if you didn’t want someone to know this info and they just used VIEW SOURCE in IE.
So be aware when you ’save as web’ from Word (or other Office 12 apps) about what is getting saved in your file…
