Below is the same short stretch of the September Choir Loft, the rehearsal notes, as Word wrote it and as I write it now. The code is shown just as it appears when the file is opened in Notepad. Long lines are folded to fit the page; nothing has been added or taken away.

A. Word 97, File, Save as HTML. Note the FONT tag opened three times for three paragraphs that are all the same size, and the B and FONT tags opened in the first line, which are closed at the start of the second in the wrong order. Note also the apostrophe in Grandy’s. It is Word's curly one, and it is the one that turned into a question mark on my sister's computer.

B. Word 2000, File, Save as Web Page. Before it gets to the rehearsal notes at all, Word 2000 writes this block of style instructions at the top of the file. They are for Word, so that it can open the page again as a Word document. My version has nothing at the top but the title.

And here are the same rehearsal notes. Every paragraph is labeled as Word's "Normal" style. The blank line between the two paragraphs, which I left in by habit, became a paragraph of its own with instructions for browsers that won't show an empty one. The two spaces I type after a period became a special span to make sure both of them show. The curly apostrophe is there again.

C. The anthem schedule. In the printed newsletter I line up the schedule with tabs. A browser throws the tabs away, and it all comes out in one line.

The cure is a table: one row for each Sunday, one cell for each column. It is more typing, but not much, and it lines up on every computer.

D. In sum. My version is shorter, it reads the same on every computer I have tried, and I understand every line of it. That last is worth the forty minutes.

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Last updated September 16, 1999