A tool that strips proprietary Microsoft tags and other cruft from Word HTML documents, leaving basic formatting intact. File sizes are greatly reduced, and the returned HTML is easier to read, revise and employ. This is intended for fairly basic styled text documents; there is no support for notes, sectioning, ‘widow’ and ‘orphan’ control, etc. Typographic quotes, proper dashes and other special characters, if they exist, will be converted to HTML entities to increase their portability among browsers and platforms. Links, tables and image references should come through fine. Everything else is stripped.

The fourth tool out of the Arc90 lab addresses one of those problems that every web developer has struggled with at some point: opening links in a new browser window. External Link is a script that appends an icon to external links — an icon that opens the link in a new window. Now, the user has the choice to follow the link in the current window by clicking on the text, or open it in a new one with the icon. It’s a nice, clean solution.