This document was created from a Mathematica notebook using Mathematica 4.0's ability to save a notebook as HTML. This capability is greatly improved over 3.0. - at least it works. However, it still seems somewhat limited. The HTMLSave command has several options:
Options[HTMLSave]{ConversionOptions -> {"MathOutput" -> "GIF", "IndirectGroupData" -> Closed,
"ConversionStyleEnvironment" -> None, "MarkupRules" -> Automatic,
"MarkupStyles" -> None, "MathMLWrapper" -> None, "HeadAttributes" -> {},
"HeadElements" -> {}}}
The options are poorly documents, however. In fact, I have yet to figure out how to modify the behavior of HTMLSave with any real success. Here are a few particular problems:
Standard form (the default for Mathematica input) is converted to a GIF for rendering in a web browser. While it looks quite nice, there are clear advantages to rendering input code as text. In particular, this makes it easy for others reading the page to copy and paste. Fortunately, input cells and output cells may be converted to InputForm, as I've done with the cells above.
Animations are not automatically converted to animated GIFs. In fact, it seems to be a pain to generate animated GIFs in general. The Export command doesn't seem to work either.
Mathematica elements and HTML elements don't correspond to each other nicely. Really, there is no reason that they should, as Mathematica and HTML are very different tools with very different purposes. For example, nothing in Mathematica seems to correspond to an HTML list. In fact, this paragraph corresponds to a cell in the notebook version which has circular dingbat to imitate a bulleted list. The dingbats don't show up in the HTML, however.
The generated HTML fails validation by the W3's HTML validator miserably.
The bottom line is that you can use HTMLSave to convert notebooks to great looking web pages easily, but you sacrifice a considerable amount of control over the pages.