by the way, if anyone is interested in open-source routines that will convert plain-ascii text into .html, you can find a _bunch_ of them out in the world... a google search on "text2html" returns "about 152,000 hits", to get you started. if that overwhelms you, try "markdown". john gruber, of the "daring fireball" blog -- http://www.daringfireball.net -- invented this one, along with aaron swartz, and it has an active community of developers. some converters have even grown directly out of project gutenberg and distribute proofreaders. donovan, over at d.p., has written one. and guiguts, by thundergnat, also of d.p., includes a routine that will output .html... likewise with bill flis, and his "gut" toolset. and lest we forget, ron burkey did some very early work on a pg-to-html converter. you can still learn a lot by visiting his site:
finally, it is worth noting that blogs and wikis allow you to provide your input as plain-text, which is then automatically converted into .html. likewise, many listserves have web-based archives, where the plain-text e-mails are converted into .html. so you could also scour these conversion routines, and learn about the process of such a conversion. all in all, there are lots of places where you can contribute to the development of a converter that will translate plain-text into an .html file... you can also just go grab the work of the people who have gone before you, if you don't want to contribute yourself... -bowerbird