read the reviews for the iphone e-book viewer-app called "eucalyptus". you will see that it gets credit for making p.g. e-texts look beautiful... eucalyptus uses the plain-text format; it elicits beauty from that format. greg notes that david widger and al haines are "updating" older e-texts with .html equivalents. do you know how they are accomplishing that? they run a program that converts the plain-text format to an .html file. to put it in other words, the .html file is elicited from the plain-text file. i guess david and al want to "get the credit" for creating the .html files, which is fine. but if they really wanted to increase overall productivity, they'd turn the conversion routine loose, so any end-user could run it, without having to wait for david or al to get around to the file they want. moreover, with more people using the routine, chances are that it would be improved via open-source coding contributions, which would be cool. but remember, it's the plain-text file that puts all of this action in play... *** greg said:
Nobody has argued that text is the master format, or should be.
that's bull-shit, pure and simple. i have argued -- at length, with good arguments, ones that nobody has been able to counter -- that the plain-text format is the master. the same conversion processes that enable eucalyptus to elicit beauty from the plain-text file and which enable whitewashers to elicit .html can be used to create any type of file-format we might want to elicit, from the kindle to .epub to .pdf to .rtf to .lit to the-next-big-thing... now, that's not to say that the current form of the plain-text files is good enough to do the job, because it's not. but that's simply because the "powers that be" haven't accepted the modifications i've suggested. but that's their stupidity, it's not an inherent weakness in the format... in summary... if you're not smart enough to see that i have won this particular debate, step right up into the circle and i will be happy to knock you out, again. -bowerbird