Publishable or Published?

[Bowerbird at aol.com]

todd said:
>   Since when is HTML only for browsers?

if you want me to ask you "what other viewer-applications
do people use to look at h.t.m.l.?", i'll be quite happy to do so.

but why didn't you just tell me your answer in the first place?
and anticipate my replies as best you could, and address them?

i'm on digest, so an exchange of views might take some time,
unless we make a conscious attempt to speed up the process.

in that light, my next response would probably go something
along the lines of "if you give people an .html-format file,
the tool that they are most likely to choose to use to view it,
lacking any instructions to the contrary, will be a browser..."

likewise, let me extend my philosophical point further:
if our viewer-programs understand our plain-text files
well enough to present them correctly _without_ having 
to first run them through some kind of conversion tool
(such as "markdown"), isn't that a better way to proceed?

or, to put it yet another way, why not embed "markdown" in
a browser, so we can feed the browser plain-text, and have it
convert that to .html internally, and then display it correctly?

i'm not here to take this listserve into a philosophical talk
that it doesn't want to have, so if i'm out of line, mr. gruber,
please feel free to declare this discussion thread off-topic...

-bowerbird