Re: 980105: Liquid data file conversion (netcdf)

>To: address@hidden
>From: address@hidden (etienne baranshamaje)
>Subject: Liquid data file conversion (netcdf)
>Organization: African Virtual University
>Keywords: 199801050036.RAA00965

Hi Etienne,

> While I haven't tried Netcdf yet, I find its concept an appealing
> one. My question is whether it can convert other documents, e.g word
> document or excel spreadsheet into an html document. The interest of
> this is that then one can travel almost freely and access his/her
> document from any internet terminal. If it doesn't, do you now of any
> other software product that does that (convert any type of file
> format, into html and vice-versa).

No, sorry, netCDF doesn't convert other document formats to HTML.  It's
just a data model and supporting software for accessing scientific array
data from programs.  It includes a couple of utilities for converting
between netCDF data and text form, but the text form is CDL, not HTML.
CDL can be viewed in a web browser by wrapping it in <PRE>...</PRE> HTML
tags.

Word already has a way to save Word documents as HTML, as part of its
"Save As" command.

See
<http://channels.microsoft.com/officefreestuff/officehelpextras/shelf/excel/xlwebpub/xlwebpub.htm>
for information about one way how to turn an Excel table into HTML.
There may be other converters available ...

Ultimately, I think this kind of information will end up as XML rather
than HTML, since XML is capable of storing binary information as well as
the metadata that describes it.  See <http://www.w3.org/XML/> for more
information.

--Russ

_____________________________________________________________________

Russ Rew                                         UCAR Unidata Program
address@hidden                     http://www.unidata.ucar.edu