[ogurechny]

Word 97 has sensible export to basic HTML. No specific web page editing tools, but allows conversion of text content of existing documents in bulk. Search for

  <META NAME="Generator" CONTENT="Microsoft Word 97">

Later versions of Office use HTML as some kind of complete document serialization format. The website

http://mc-computing.com/HTML_Examples/html_Generators.htm

reminds that there exist Microsoft's own clean-up tool (without doubt, an internal pet project which became essential), “Office 2000 HTML Filter”.

[bartread]

Thanks, I stand corrected. The export from Word 2000 was anything but basic. And it did, as far as possible, seem to try to serialize most aspects of the document. Which, of course, is not really what you want from a 1999/2000 web page that most people would view over dial-up.

I suspect their target market with this was enterprise intranets where everybody would be forced to use IE, and therefore all the ActiveX garbage would render just fine... and given LAN bandwidth most people probably wouldn't notice the ridiculously large payload sizes (for the era) of these pages.

I didn't know about the HTML filter though because I only experimented with the export once or twice, during the evenings after lectures, which was enough to convince me I was heading down a dead-end path.