Html debris copied from other websites

[Note: These stray tags are no longer an issue since I converted to using blogdown to create webpages.]

When I use cut-and-paste to get information from other webpages copied to other pages (respecting copyright, of course), I get some stray html code that clutters up my web pages. I also seem to get some of this clutter just by cutting-and-pasting from Microsoft Word or even from within Frontpage itself.

One of the most common of these stray codes is <span>. This tag is used a lot with Cascading Style Sheets, two things which I have not bothered adding yet to my web pages. Out of morbid curiosity, I noted all the various <span> tags on my site.

• <span class=“copySubtitle-B”>
• <span class=“DA”>
• <span class=“Fn”>
• <span class=“Ip”>
• <span class=“Is”>
• <span class=“Mn”>
• <span class=“Pb”>
• <span class=“Pg”>
• <span class=“Pn”>
• <span class=“Sn”>
• <span class=“V”>
• <span class=“Yr”>
• <span id=“BodyContent”>
• <span style=“background-color: #FFFFFF”>
• <span style=“background-color: #FFFF00”>
• <span style=“color: black”>
• <span style=“font-size: 12.0pt; font-family: Times New Roman; font-weight: 700”>
• <span style=“font-size: 12.0pt; font-family: Times New Roman; font-weight: 700”>
• <span style=“font-size:24.0pt”>
• <span STYLE=“font-style: normal”>
• <span style=“font-weight: 400”>
• <span style=“font-weight: 700”>
• <span STYLE=“font-weight: medium”>
• <span title=“BMJ (Clinical research ed.)” onmouseover=“AbbrLookUp(this, ‘BMJ.’);”>
• <span title=“The New England journal of medicine.” onmouseover=“AbbrLookUp(this, ‘N Engl J Med.’);”>

These tags do not directly affect the display of my webpages, so it would be safe to ignore them. But the thought of alien tags on my website bothered me enough that I took the trouble to strip them all out.

Update (October 3, 2007) Another stray tag is <font face=“Times New Roman”>

Earlier versions are here and here.