i said:
>   without even looking at those files, i can guess what's wrong...
>  
>   many of the books that are exclusively poetry are set flush to
>   the left margin, lacking any of the leading spaces that serve
>   as a signal to the conversion program not to wrap the lines...
>
>   so of course the converter is gonna wrap the lines.
>
>   this is an error, a major error, in the processing of these books.
>
>   (and it's so easy to change every linebreak to a linebreak+space.)

well, gee, i should have looked at those files earlier, because
when i did get around to looking at them, i got a good laugh.

see, the lines _were_ indented, so shouldn't have been wrapped.

and wouldn't have been wrapped if most of the converters around
would've been used.

but i have since learned that there is an "experimental" converter,
programmed by marcello, and that's what was used for this book.

the irony of this gave me a big hearty laugh.

you see, when i laid out the philosophy of z.m.l. here on this list,
some of you will remember how much crap marcello threw at me.
the guy was relentless.  even though he almost never made _any_
posts to the list otherwise, he would respond negatively to anything
i said.  but never constructively.  he'd just throw out pure bullcrap...
for a long time i responded, just to clearly specify that it was crap;
but after a while i decided to let his crap speak for its crappy self,
and i stopped responding.  after that, he stopped responding to me.
(i guess that thing they say about not feeding the trolls is right on.)
but if you wanna see what an ass he was, you can check the archives.
you can also go look at a website he set up with a lot of quotes from
messages i sent here.  most of them are taken out of context, sure,
but even then i stand behind them.  you'll see that they were correct.
(that's right, he set up a _fan_ page, on his web-site, to ridicule me;
i don't know where the guy is coming from, but i think he should
get a life.)

anyway, marcello insisted that my approach was bunk, and that one
could not successfully generate a full-on .html file from a .txt version.

yet now he is writing code to do just that.

(he's not doing it _successfully_ yet, so in regard to _himself_ alone,
i guess he was right.  but i have been successful for a long time now.)

what's especially ironic -- and funny to me -- is that marcello is now
suffering through the same complications that i experienced, namely
maddeningly inconsistent .txt files, which he must program around,
just like i did.  further, this will lead him to the same conclusion that
i came to, which is that this would be _much_ simpler if only the rules
that p.g. has already established for .txt files were simply _followed_...

even more irony, and thus even more humor?

marcello is programming in _python_, a language where indentation
is _meaningful_.  this is ironic, and funny, because one of the things
about z.m.l. which marcello once tried to lambaste is that whitespace
is meaningful.  every time he does an indent, i hope he chokes on it.

meanwhile, i just have one thing to say to all you z.m.l. naysayers:
i told you so.  you were wrong.  i was right.  i hope you choke on it.

(wait, is that one thing, or 4 things?  oh well, guess it doesn't matter.)

-bowerbird