November 9, 2008
Someone sent me a comment requesting that I put text versions of my stories on the FTP site instead of HTML. Normally I would argue that HTML is superior to text because I can include markup, and sometimes the markup, usually italics to denote thought or stress particular words in a conversation, is very important to understand the story.
The HTML versions are pretty readable anyway because all of the layout is done with CSS so it doesn't generally interrupt the story itself. If you can get used to ignoring the tags at the beginning and ending of every line, you can read it in any text editor. Or you can convert it to plain text by using the Replace feature in a text editor to get rid of those paragraph markers and italics tags, then delete the header and footer by hand.
Furthermore, I don't want to take down the HTML versions of my stories from the FTP site even though they're still on the web site, because I consider the HTML versions to be the "definitive" or "canonical" versions, because of the markup issue mentioned above. When reading ASSTR, when I come across an author I like, I'll often start up an FTP client and download their whole directory at once so I can read it later at my leisure, and I would prefer to download the official version rather than a modified, reformatted version. I want to extend the same courtesy to my readers.
Finally, I find the special coding that ASSTR appends to text files annoying. Sometimes I just want to download a file and read it offline later, and the special coding gets in the way because it transforms it into something other than text.
However, the person who sent the comment pointed out one thing that pretty much destroys all of my arguments above. That same special coding that I find so annoying is great for someone who's disabled. They can set the font size larger, and can set it to autoscroll so they don't have to click with the mouse so much.
So here's what I'm going to do. I won't take down the HTML versions of my stories, but I will add a folder with plain text versions of all of them. I'll add it only to the FTP site, not the web site, because I still want to encourage people to read the HTML versions whenever possible. That should hopefully satisfy everyone.
It will take a while to convert my stories, especially since I need to do some research into how to set up the Standard Header System on text files. (If you're an author and don't know what that means, please look it up here. This is the Keywords and Summary that appear in the Most Recent page, and adding them will make your stories easier to look up on ASSTR) I expect to have it done later today.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.