One of the most touted features of Word 2007 was the fact that the HTML pushed out from the client is that it would be “clean” and XHTML compliant.  Well, unfortunately that has been proven false.

Having implemented the MetaWeblog API for our in-house blogging system at work, I’ve been playing around with Word 2007 and Windows Live Writer (WLW) to test out the API.  And from these tests, we’ve found that Word 2007 fails miserably when posting.

The problem manifests when adding links that span more than one word.  For example if you have text like this:  My Post.  If you create a link between the two words in Word 2007, the markup is created incorrectly.  In some cases the <a> tag is created as required but a </span> closing tag is created before the </a> closing tag is added. 

Therefore the HTML that is output is completely broken which causes the browsers to render the blog post completely incorrectly. 

Considering this is something that Microsoft pushed as a major reason to change to the 2007 office suite, this really does suck.  Hopefully a KB can come out to sort out this issue.

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