a blade of grass cracks the sidewalk

[Bowerbird at aol.com]

alan said:

>    Congrats on shipping a nice dingus, Bowerbird.


i'm hoping someone with design chops takes pity on me,
and contributes something that looks significantly better.
but at base, it's just a 2-pane tool, so that's what matters.



>    It does indeed look like 

>    an extremely clean and powerful syntax.


that's what i was aiming at, yes.   easy to understand,
as a naive user, and easy to handle, as a programmer.
delivering great functionality while remaining simple.



>    What causes the entire first page to be in bold? 

>    Convention? 


mostly convention, yes.

the target is books, so the first section/page is defined as
the cover/title-page, which is traditionally centered bold.

but where there is a lot of text, such as on the example,
bold may be overkill, so that's something i might change.

i've been closely examining books for several decades now,
so i have a very firm idea about what my starting place is...
but i'm also quite flexible to the ways authors and readers
want to shape e-books to fulfill their destiny, which means
i am going to be quite attentive to the feedback they give...

i don't anticipate that _a_lot_ will change, but _everything_
is up for questioning; nothing is too sacred to be touched.



>    Styles applied after your transformation to HTML? 


i'm not quite sure what you're asking.

there isn't a whole lot of styling going on, as you'll see
if you view source.   it's intentionally quite barren, since
the e-book viewer-programs today ignore most styling,
and substitute in their own, so it's best to just surrender.

another consideration is that my philosophical bent is that
it's the reader who should set many of the styling options.
so my viewer-program will allow the reader to customize.
part of the preparation for that is to get authors used to
the notion that they no longer control the look-and-feel.
(especially not with a tool that does the grunge for them.)

so it's a combination of both practical and philosophical.

having said all of that, the styling process is one of those
things on which i'll be actively soliciting input from users.

also, for instance, it would certainly be possible to offer
authors the option of using their own c.s.s. stylesheet...

and even if i didn't offer them that, it's not like they can't
simply edit the .html output before they go public with it.

what i haven't shown yet is that the .html gets wrapped up
into an .epub, and a .mobi, and a .pdf is created as well...
but you also get the .html files that build the .epub/.mobi.
(the 4, x, and 5 buttons display the various .html outputs.
right now, they're virtually identical; but they could fork.)

-bowerbird

p.s.   and yes, to all you haters whose mouths are frothing...
if this conversation persists for long, we'll take it elsewhere.
but if it makes you feel better, please post your rant anyway.
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