October 2004 - gutvol-d - lists.pglaf.org

re: Re: [gutvol-d] Re: aspects of a well-done e-book
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 21 Oct '04

21 Oct '04

stephen said: > One advantage of print is the ease of bookmarking a spot -- > something that can't be done easily on most ebooks, depends on the viewer-program. > although I'm working on a simple HTML solution. ok. :+) > most browsers can easily accomodate the complete, > single-file version of the average work, up to a MB or so. that download is downright painful if you're on dial-up. and if there are images involved, it gets even worse. and -- at least on some browsers, not naming any names -- when c.s.s. is used, the formatting doesn't seem to get done until the whole file is downloaded, which is a huge handicap. (and every time you resize the window, you have to wait again.) > Something like Don Quixote is a bit more of a problem > as a single file, being large in text size and also carrying > many illustrations, making the total download many megabytes. > Something that large really needs to be split. or downloaded as a zip and read offline. and even then, it can take a while for a browser to load and display it. if you want, i can do some actual timed trials on my mac; i suspect that the results might surprise you. in general, i've found speed in computers is very easy to get used to; it's difficult to remember how slow an old computer was, unless you actually fire it up and deal with it once again. when you do, it'll usually dumbfound you how slow it was, and you wonder how you ever got anything done at that pace. same with broadband. put a bunch of techies back on dialup, and they would understand why the masses are slow to adopt -- the systems the techies are building are simply unusable... -bowerbird

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Re: [gutvol-d] Re: aspects of a well-done e-book
by Joshua Hutchinson 21 Oct '04

21 Oct '04

----- Original Message ----- From: "David A. Desrosiers" <hacker(a)gnu-designs.com> > > > Well, in a perfect world, we could guarantee that the separate CSS > > file is accessible and life is good. Unfortunately, since we can't > > guarantee the CSS file is there, we decided to embed the CSS inside > > the HTML. > > If you can guarantee the HTML is there, you can guarantee that > the CSS is there. If the CSS is missing, it shouldn't "break" the > usability of the HTML document. > I can guarantee that CSS file is in the PG directory. I can't guarantee that Joe Sixpack will download that when he grabs the HTML file. Overall, this makes things simpler for the consumer of the e-text. > > It bloats it somewhat, but it is still smaller than the obligatory > > PG header information, so I don't feel TOO badly about it. And now > > we get a fully self-contained file. > > I don't understand the correlation. What does your CSS size > have to do with the obligatory PG header size? > The CSS adds to the size of the etext, and on some level that feels ... wrong. I can't explain why, it just does. However, whenever PG posts a new e-text, they add a great big header and footer to the document for legal reasons. That thing absolutely dwarfs the CSS style header is size, so I don't feel AS badly as I might otherwise. It was mostly a throw-away comment, so don't read too much into it. > > Now that I think about it, you may be right... In Firefox (which is > > what I have on this machine), there is no View -> Use Style menu > > option, but there is the icon in the bottom left corner. *shrug* > > For those that want to see this in a much-more expanded > version, go to http://w3.org/Style/ in a Gecko-based browser, and > click on the icon, or go to View -> Use Style, and try the various > stylesheets listed there. > > > I have a big aversion to taking an electronic document and > > presenting it as "pages." First and foremost, it is ugly. > > I submit that having page numbers in an unintuitive place > (left-side margins, which doesn't appear in any printed work I can > find), is just as ugly. > The original page breaks were necessitated by the size of paper the publisher used. There is almost never a functional meaning to the page breaks in a book (except things like chapter breaks, which are easily marked up with horizontal rules or something to that effect). The page numbers in the margins are small and fairly unobstrusive, yet give the information in the easiest manner I could devise. Furthermore, they are completely hidden unless the read WANTS to have that information. > > Second, it is going to wreck havoc whenever the user wants to > > change font sizes, page sizes, etc. > > Having the border at the bottom of page 423 with a font size > of 1.0em is still going to put the border at the bottom of the page > when the font is 2.8em. > > I think I'm missing your allegory here. Can you explain? > If you put visible page breaks into an HTML document, the user is going to expect that document to print to his printer at exactly those page breaks. Good luck. Also, page breaks would only make sense if you broke them into "visual" chunks. By that, I mean sizes that fit into one screen at a time -- no scrolling. However, if the user has a different resolution than you, it ain't gonna work. If he changes the font size, it ain't gonna work. Basically, using visual page dividers is getting into typography, something you want to avoid. Good HTML lets the browser and the user format the text. You just tell them what KIND of text it is. The page numbers are not meant to give you visual indication of page breaks as much as contextual information regarding the original source... which some people find very important and as it's fairly easy for me to include that information without disturbing the other readers, I do. Josh PS None of this is an argument for my CSS based HTML over TEI-Lite. I would LOVE if we have TEI-Lite capabilities right now... But we don't.

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re: RE: RE: Re: [gutvol-d] Why Bowerbird is a genius
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 21 Oct '04

21 Oct '04

joseph said: > Not raw ascii glory -- hex...get it right. have you looked? maybe it's different on the p.c. side, but on my mac, when i pull either one of the versions into a file-viewer, and scroll down, the text is right there. > Also, why announce your program for beta testing > and then say don't worry about reporting bugs since > you have a new version coming out soon anyway... > what a waste of time. you seemed very eager to have the program, and to spread it around, even posting it on your own site, so i figured that kind of devotion deserved the newest version i could provide. and once i have gotten all the features to where _i_ want them, in a few days or so, _then_ i will be ready for beta-testers to send me reports on that version. until then, anything they report might well be something that i already intend to fix anyway... but then again, you don't really care anyway, do you? nonetheless, i will respond to you, at least until we have posted as many messages with the "genius" header as we posted with the "kook" header, which was a lot... -bowerbird

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sudden surge in demand
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 20 Oct '04

20 Oct '04

due to the sudden surge in demand, i've uploaded a new version of my beta-test viewer-program... it can be found in the files section of the yahoogroups listserve for the beta-test, which is under the name of "zml_talk". you can join that beta-test by subscribing via e-mail: zml_talk-subscribe(a)yahoogroups.com this upload is just "the daily build", and has _not_ been reviewed, so it should be considered as such... people who want to run a version _known_ to be stable should hold off on this. such a version will go up soon. additionally, no reports are necessary on this version, since a few of the features have yet to be implemented. but if you'd like to see the development of the program since the version uploaded on 7/27, it's there for you... sorry it's taken so long, but you know how things are. time flies when you're squashing bugs... -bowerbird

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re: RE: Re: [gutvol-d] Why Bowerbird is a genius
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 20 Oct '04

20 Oct '04

gruber said: > Run the program and then Ctrl+Alt+Del it. > Ooops...there goes a "never-crash". control-alt-delete? is that how you end all your programs? :+) i recommend you try the "quit" button instead, or choose "quit" or "exit" under the file menu. but if that's a bug, which is entirely possible -- to be expected in fact -- in a beta-version, i'll fix it. but please take the bug-reports to the beta-test listserve, so they'll be logged. but don't bother with doing that _now_. as your version is almost 3 months old. a new version will be out very soon, and you should wait to test that one instead... > P.S. Why are you hiding the etexts in your code > instead of making them separate .txt's? first things first. priorities. and control of the degrees of freedom for enhanced troubleshooting the first objective is to get the program solid. to focus on that, it's wise to use content that i _know_ has been correctly formatted in z.m.l. once the app is acting correctly and is stable, i'll turn to texts that might be marked up wrong, confident that if i get unexpected behavior, it's due to an incorrect text or a defective z.m.l. rule, in all likelihood, and not some bug in the program. but the e-texts aren't really "hidden" right now. if you scrutinize any version of the program in a file-viewer, you will see the e-texts inside, "hiding" in plain sight in their raw-ascii glory. they can be recovered, in full, easily, any time. -bowerbird

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re: re: re: Re: [gutvol-d] re: coming to michael doorstep with hat in hand
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 20 Oct '04

20 Oct '04

the hacker said: > You wrongly asserted that I voted to > "leave the trailing edge behind". I said no such thing. > Users make their own choice to learn or not to learn. the trailing edge _is_ largely composed of people who -- as you put it -- "refuse to learn, to adapt, and to grow". (ironically, some of them actually want to read books!) further, telling them you don't care if they "stagnate and stay in their own nice warm puddle" is leaving them behind. you can try to fancy it up with a spin, but that's what it is. and the fact of the matter is that a whole lot of people are _stuck_ with machines that simply will not run a browser that is "standards-compatible", because they don't believe -- rightly or wrongly -- that they can afford a newer one, perhaps because this month they're trying to decide whether they want to spend their last dollars keeping warm or eating. there are people right here on this listserve who've told you that they don't control the browser that their machine runs, probably because they are using a computer in their library that billy g. installed there precisely to extend his monopoly. or maybe, once again ironically, it was a computer that was put into a school when microsoft fulfilled the terms of the court judgment, thereby (amazingly) extending the monopoly. or maybe, even more likely, they're in a school that hasn't had any budget to buy new computers since the ones they got in '94. there's a whole big world out there, with lots of people in it... myself, i'm running a mac g3, circa 1998, with os8.1. can you tell me a standards-compliant browser to use? -bowerbird

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re: news flash, josh is psychic too
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 20 Oct '04

20 Oct '04

josh said: > ZML (Zero Markup Language) is ... wait for it ... a MARKUP LANGUAGE. you seem to be psychic today too. must be the rain... a plain-text file and a z.m.l. file are so similar that -- even using your newfound psychic powers, josh -- you probably can't tell them apart. look at alice30.txt. is it a plain-text file? or is it a z.m.l. file? you tell me. the important points about z.m.l. that make it relevant are that: 1) it is extremely simple, so simple anyone can use it, and 2) it does the job that needs to be done. now, let us discuss x.m.l. in that context... -bowerbird

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Re: [gutvol-d] Re: aspects of a well-done e-book
by Gutenberg9443＠aol.com 20 Oct '04

20 Oct '04

In a message dated 10/20/2004 12:50:16 PM Mountain Standard Time, joshua(a)hutchinson.net writes: Are you sure we're talking about the same thing? By page break, I mean when you get to the bottom of the physical piece of paper. What you describe sounds more to me like what I usually refer to as a thought break ... a little white space or a graphic symbol between sections of text to indicate a scene transition or time passing, etc. Typically, in PG texts, those are marked with 5 asterisks (functionally equivalent to your # # #). Okay. The name of those things is page break. Obviously in computerese the word page break has a different meaning, as I should remember myself considering how many times I have inserted a page break into something. Anne

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Re: [gutvol-d] jeroen's even-handed analysis
by D. Starner 20 Oct '04

20 Oct '04

Gutenberg9443(a)aol.com writes: > Lead, follow, or get out of the way. Can you supply a way > to do this? If so, do it. We can. XML, among other things, is a simple way to do this. > But all the same, I'd rather that readers have that version > than no version at all of the book. How many people can't read the Latin-1 version? How many people read that version when they could read the Latin-1 version just fine? People have sent back editions with the accents re-added despite the fact that we already had an edition with accents, so there is evidence that having both editions is bad. > The principle of the greatest good for the greatest number > doesn't mean let's throw out the lesser numbers. How dare we be so provincial as to ignore the EBCDIC users. There's thousands of character sets in the world--what gives us the right to ignore the "lesser numbers" of non-ASCII users? -- ___________________________________________________________ Sign-up for Ads Free at Mail.com http://promo.mail.com/adsfreejump.htm

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re: Re: [gutvol-d] Re: aspects of a well-done e-book
by D. Starner 20 Oct '04

20 Oct '04

"Joshua Hutchinson" writes: > In my case, at the very least, if you find something > I've worked on that does NOT degrade gracefully in > Lynx, etc.... Let me know. I consider that a bug in my work. Part of my problem is that I'd rather have it just work in Lynx, IE, etc. instead of degrading gracefully. In the long run, I'd like to see us generate HTML from the XML that just works in Lynx and IE by hard-coding the CSS stuff in where possible, possibly even producing a special text-browser HTML; this all of course alongside the HTML for standards-compliant browsers (which we probably ought to call Netscape 6+, Mozilla and most other non-IE browsers, instead of assuming our client base knows or cares about standards-complaince.) Of course, CSS is the best option right now. (It's a little off-topic, but are you still up for doing the first Early English Text Society HTML edition?) -- ___________________________________________________________ Sign-up for Ads Free at Mail.com http://promo.mail.com/adsfreejump.htm

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