Bowerbird@aol.com wrote:
Now, just to check my understanding, this is a document that went from PG-TEI -> zml -> HTML?
i started with plain-ascii text-files -- the origin of which is irrelevant --
No, it is not. Because you claim to be able to convert the existing texts of the pg archive with almost no markup work at all. Yet, to demonstrate your `converter' you take a file that was produced by a machine. Of course this file is much more regular, and thus easier to cope with, than most of the human-edited files in the pg archive. If you were by any means serious about your `converter', you would take a random selection of at least 100 files out of the pg archive and tweak them so they work in your `converter'. You would then post the source code of your `converter' and the diffs documenting how many changes were necessary to the files to make them work. We could then run those files thru your `converter' and see for ourselves if it works as claimed or doesn't work
i then ran that through my text-to-html converter. for alice, i did this long ago, and might have hand-tweaked things after that conversion,
So the 159 errors went away by `hand tweaking' the output and not by fixing the bugs in the `converter' ? Are the end-users also expected to hand-tweak the output before reading the book?
last friday, you might or might not recall, i turned my focus to "passing the validator"
Was this before or after? you shouted to the world:
i don't give a whit about validation. ... for the time being, my conversion routines will _not_ give .html that passes the validator. and that's a conscious decision.
You should decide on one lie and stick to it. Or people will start to think about foxes and sour grapes.
i don't know -- or care -- what it might be, because both ways work fine in 99% of the browsers out there in the installed base.
How do you prove your claim that your broken html works in "99% of the browsers out there" ? Did you check your work with browsercam? Do you even *know* how many different user-agents there are "out there" ? And even if it should work in 99% (which it does not!) still you would leave 1% out in the rain. This is not an option if you want to post your texts on PG.
i will make sure my converter outputs files that do _not_ validate, since i don't want any of my "antagonists" here using _my_program_ to further their technoid aims which are directly contrary to my own...
Who should want to use a program that makes 159 blunders in a short text and requires `hand tweaking' the output to pass the validator ? Don't lose any of your sleep over that. I think you are *absolutely* safe from that direction. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org