michael said:

Not correct. We were using most of these techniques before zml. . . .

michael's right. i devised zen markup language -- (the "z" can stand for whatever you want it to be!) -- mainly using the existing rules for pg-etext... but some of the rules were taken from protocols that were spontaneously created by people using e-mail, and listserves, and forums, even -- heck, what were they called?, things like alt.comics.com? and wikipedia too. i think i got the idea of using brackets around a footnote number from there... also, as i looked at more and more o.c.r. from scans, i came to develop some additional rules from that... whatever makes sense, or is an existing convention that is recognized in the population, i will use that. lee has been so confused by z.m.l. -- and so willing to spread his confusion to others -- that i never even bother to read his posts any more. i have him kill-filed. and just so you know, an indented block is indicated by the ">" indicator which is very common in e-mails. i use it myself, and always follow it with three spaces. and many e-mail programs use it as their "default"... who knows?, maybe even lee's e-mail program uses it.

Spousal Markup Language: there are rules, but you have to figure them out for yourself, and they are subject to change.

that's a funny one! :+) well, the rules _are_ still subject to change, guilty... the latest change is that a line which has a space in column 1 and _not_ column 2 is _centered_... and it's one of the best rules that i every made! but for the most part, they aren't hard to figure out. the notion is that, whatever people do _naturally_, that's what we adopt as "a rule". the big idea behind it all is that the _computer_ should just _figure_out_ what you want it to do. so, for instance, when people start a new chapter, they usually put in a bunch of blank lines first... so the computer should "just know" that if you have put in a bunch of blank lines, followed by something that looks like it is a chapter header -- because, as a for instance, it contains the word "chapter" in it, which could be a dead giveaway -- then it should know that it is indeed a new chapter, and it should thus format the header appropriately, and the table of contents should link to this place, and the chapter header should link back to the toc, and so on and so forth, yadda yadda, you get it... the heavy-markup people, on the other hand, want _you_ to have to _mark_ everything yourself. they want you to laboriously label each chapter header _as_ a chapter header, and they want you to have to specify each of the links yourself too. they expect the computer to be an idiot that can only figure out what to do if you tell it explicitly. heavy-markup people think computers are stupid. they would have _never_ built watson. -bowerbird