- gutvol-d - lists.pglaf.org

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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re: [gutvol-d] Posting TEI
by Joshua Hutchinson 20 Oct '04

20 Oct '04

----- Original Message ----- From: Bowerbird(a)aol.com > > marcello said: > > A TEI text is basically a text file. > > right. if you could tell josh this, i'd appreciate it. > Text file and PLAIN text file are two different things. XML/HTML/XHTML/TEI/TEI-Lite/ZML ... those are all text files. None of them are PLAIN text files, which is what you always seem to advocate. ZML (Zero Markup Language) is ... wait for it ... a MARKUP LANGUAGE. That means it is just like XML/HTML, etc. Except that the rest are open standards with open source utilities available. ZML is you just wasting our time. Josh

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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: > only in the sense that you've taken my words completely out of context, and twisted them to suit a discussion that wasn't even part of the original reply. you said -- as clearly as it can be said -- that your attitude is to leave the trailing edge behind. i only said that's not what michael's attitude is. and it is a historical fact that it has been michael -- and _not_ all the people with your attitude -- that has created the best library in cyberspace so far. if you don't give him -- and his attitude -- that credit, you will (like so many others) fail to learn from history. > I'm rapidly tiring of this, and its a waste of my time, > as well as the time of others. you're a quick study, david. it took me 6 months to figure that out. you've gotten the message in one week. :+) > If we're not moving forward, we're not moving this place hasn't been able to move forward on x.m.l. in 3 years. if you read the archives, you'll see all these threads are re-runs. > and that is never a wise thing to continue to expend effort upon. righto. that's why i'm leaving shortly. i just came back for one last harrah, to set the record straight one more time that "i told you so, and did it repeatedly..." -bowerbird

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re: [gutvol-d] Posting TEI
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 20 Oct '04

20 Oct '04

marcello said: > A TEI text is basically a text file. right. if you could tell josh this, i'd appreciate it. > So you can read it in any editor. "read" might not be the best word-choice there. "view" is more appropriate, i would think, since the markup will often obscure the content itself. > If you use emacs you can also > validate the TEI file against the DTD > without leaving the editor. that's a nice thing to be able to do. but the .tei might be _valid_ and still not do what it's supposed to do, accurately reflect the underlying structure and therefore result in a correct rendering... because i know you're all curious, with the z.m.l. authoring-tool, people will be able to see exactly what the viewer-program will display, in a window alongside their edit window. if it doesn't look right in the display window, you make changes in the edit window until it does. the rules are so simple that this is very easy to do. > A perfectly valid TEI file with no spelling errors > should be good enough to post. only if it's marked up _correctly_, though, right? > So we can have bith an alice30.pgtei and an alice30.jtei. that sounds like loads of fun... twice as much, at least! -bowerbird

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re: re: Re: [gutvol-d] jeroen's even-handed analysis
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 20 Oct '04

20 Oct '04

josh said: > ZML ... IS ... NOT ... PLAIN ... TEXT! of course it is. x.m.l. and h.t.m.l. and s.g.m.l. are too. it all reduces down to 1s and 0s. it's just that some formats are more or less readable in that state. -bowerbird

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