kengr

A friend got hold of me a few hours ago. Seems that a friend of hers was having trouble getting a web page up.

Said page (actually a small set of pages) was written in MS Publisher..... AIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEE. It burns, it burns.....

Said set of pages was a *single* 3 meg MHTML file.

After looking at it with a text editor, I found that it was a multipart mime file. Fortunately I knew a trick to get the components separated.

You rename the file and add .mim to the filename. That will let you use WinZip to get the parts out.

Of course, that resulted in 8 files named 0001.txt, 0002.txt, etc, and several dozen UNKNOWN.001, UNKNOWN.002, etc.

Fortunately, the text files were all html and had their names buried inside in some of the redundant (and broken) code.

PMVIEW showed me which of the other files were images and what kind. A bit of renaming and they at least had the right extension.

And one of the html files was actually an XML file that listed the file names. Which told me that the remaining odd files were .WMZ files.

Now, *hours* later, I've gotten the proper names on the graphics files. And got the pages to work in Firefox and mostly work in IE.

And found that the wmz files and several of the graphics files are not needed at all.

Next is cleaning out the *thousands* of lines of unnecessary garbage from the html files. And seeing if I the resulting files can be turned into something maintainable (there are things like Christmas want lists implemented as GIF files with links to websites done as image maps. Shudder)

I'm half tempted to take the *real* images and the text from the lists and try creating something similar. Which would likely take maybe 100k. Counting the remaining images.

Got a clue for folks. Do *not* try to create a web page with a publishing program or with a word processing program. The results are invariably ugly, bloated beyond belief and impossible to maintain.