And not in a good way.
If your blog looked just fine until you published that last post, if your blog post suddenly makes looks weird and the blog no longer lays out properly, if you suddenly find that you made the background of your post area dissapear, then you probably have a bad case of msword garbage code.
let's peek at the source code for a healthy happy webpage:
Healthy wordpress text should look like this:
notice the occasional < p > or < br/ >? that's healthy wordpress text
1.) click on the button that says "source" ( it may say "html" - i use dean's fck wysiwyg editor plugin so i have a more cohesive editing tool bar. yours may look different depending on what editor you use)
notice all the < p style="text-alig: left crap arial; font-size: 13 px crap?
i call that garbage code- it's unnecessary and you DO not need it. in fact, that garbage formatting may interfere with the formatting provided by the stylesheet accessed by wordpress.
bad msword garbage code text looks like this:
see all that garbage code? bad stuff.
it interferes with automatic formatting written into the stylesheet for wordpress and will sometimes screwup the php coding of wordpress itself. mixed into that msword garbage code are little div tags. tehya re the ones that look like <div> or </div>
those tags are really really bad, wicked bad within a wordpress post.
all the formatting and styling of a wordpress website is defined by a series of < d i v > tags so to introduce from another source will cause all sorts of problems. these div tags are the most probable reason the site looks weird.
ALWAYS PASTE CLEAN TEXT!
if you want to paste an article that you copied from an email or from microsoft word- you need to paste it using this button called "Paste from Word". It will open a window and you can paste the text in the window and the program will strip the formatting and divs.
If you have dean's fck wysiwyg editor plugin installed, the "Paste From Word" button looks like this:
If you are using the built-in wordpress editor, the "Paste From Word" button will look like this:
