Using word document for body text in HTML

[crimsonkid]

Hey everyone,

I'm trying to attach a .doc or .txt file to my HTML website just for the body text. I have designed a website for a client and they wish to be able to easily and quickly change the body text of the document. They have little web experience so they cannot change the HTML themselves.

Could someone please show me or point me to a good tutorial explaining this, because I have looked around but been unable to find much of use.

Thanks for your help

[Stampyhead]

I'm not sure I fully understand what you're trying to do, but a web browser can't read a Word doc within a web page. If you want your client to be able to do updates himself then you need to set up a CMS or have him get Adobe Contribute.

[crimsonkid]

Oh okay, thanks.

I was told that you could use .txt or .xml files to link into a webpage to display text, is this not true?

If not could you tell me if there are anyways to work around this?

[angelwatt]

You can't really do that. Though it doesn't look like it, Word has a ton of markup to the text that is hidden, which is what makes it so hard to do what you want.

You'll want to look at possible WYSIWYG type programs like Dreamweaver or Kompozer for them to make simple edits to content. This way make them learn HTML. An alternative is to setup a CMS for them to modify content.

[crimsonkid]

Yeah I had heard that, so its not possible to use say... a .txt file that loads into a table solely for the purpose of displaying some text?

And what was CMS?

It would be much easier to make them learn some simple HTML or dreamweaver but I'm not sure that it is possible.

[angelwatt]

Originally Posted by crimsonkid

Yeah I had heard that, so its not possible to use say... a .txt file that loads into a table solely for the purpose of displaying some text?

And what was CMS?

It would be much easier to make them learn some simple HTML or dreamweaver but I'm not sure that it is possible.

You can include a plain text file using SSI (server side includes). See this page for some details. You can do something similar to this with PHP if they make use of a specific filename and have that included through PHP.

CMS stands for content management system. All of the site content is stored in a database (in most cases anyways) and you can edit the content through a web interface similar to these posts.

[crimsonkid]

Hey thanks for that, seems to be exactly what I need.
I'll give it a read through and trial and post back if there are any issues.

Thanks for your help