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General discussion

Pull content from an "old school" tabular design webpage.

Sep 25, 2007 3:41AM PDT

I've been searching on the web for the best way to do this but I haven't found anything. Basically, I'm redesigning an internal web site for my company to comply with html 4.01 standards and css. I need to grab the content and links from these old pages but the guy who designed the page used tables for design. Some of the pages are long and I don't have time to retype and re-link all the content.

Is there a way to just grab the content and links without all the stupid table layout crap? I would prefer a script or a program to do this.

Thanks,

Discussion is locked

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You can always say ...
Sep 25, 2007 7:27AM PDT

that tables are HTML 4.1 compliant. It seems there's a implicit requirement here.

All I can suggest: copy and paste the contents of each cell from your browser to your new source.
I've got a 'copy link' in my Firefox context menu for a link, but I really don't know if it's included in the program or comes from an extension I installed.

Finally a prediction. Within 2 years someone will get the task of converting your html/css source to a CMS-based system. And he will ask here if there's some automatic way to put the content of that stupid html crap into his CMS-database. Maybe you can get some extra time from your boss to do it right now?

I'm sure someone else will have better suggestions.

Kees

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tables as design = not good
Sep 25, 2007 12:37PM PDT

Kees,

I have to disagree with you. Although tables cana be used in html 4.1, using them for webpage design should be an abandoned practice. In the late 90s, when web browsers were just becoming popular, it may have been okay to use tables for style since thats all they had back then.

Copying and pasting would work but that is way too slow for me. I need something more automatic. I can try and write a script to do the job but it would take me weeks compare to a seasoned computer programmer or unix power user.

The main reason I'm converting our page to html 4.01 is that the original webpages are too complicated to update. If someone wants to convert them to some other format after I'm done with it, they can go ahead. But, they would still have the same problem as I have.