Picture this. You’re having a slow day in the office and you decide to browse some of your client’s websites to see how they are getting on with the gift of a CMS you have given them, and you stumble across a page with inconsistent fonts, sizes and spacing to the rest of the website. Or, if you’re lucky enough to have one who notices these things, your client has reported the issue themselves. Regardless of how you did, you got there and now you have this problem staring at you in the face. Mocking you with its power over your beautifully crafted CSS.

It doesn’t take two seconds to find the route of the problem – your client has authored their highly valued content in a word processing suite such as Microsoft Word and opted to copy and paste this content into your rich text area. Unbeknownst to them, along with their carefully structured content they have also copied across a plethora of code which Microsoft Word has deemed necessary for the content to function, because, god forbid, the content is not rendered in their font Calibri.

We’ve all been there – a multitude of times.

WYSIWYG editors have even become advanced enough to, should you opt to, strip out all of this unnecessary code, however leaving your content just as lumps of plain text. What about all your headings? Captions? Tables? This leaves your client with the overhead of then having to re-format all of their content as they want it to be displayed and we all know how that markup looks like. Or worse, they opt for the Microsoft Word code not to be stripped out at all because whilst the fonts, sizes and spacing might not be consistent with the rest of their website, at least their content is how they intended.

My frustration is then, why doesn’t word processing suites switch to format their documents using the open standard – HTML.

Most, if not all, that a word processing suite needs is available to them. We have paragraphs of text, we have headings to structure a document, we have tables, imagery and, with the recent help of HTML5, even rich media can be achieved through the use of audio, video, canvas or SVG.

Then it wouldn’t matter if this code was copied across along with our client’s content into the rich text editor because at least then the code is already in the correct format, and a semantic one at that! It only seems logical, no?