Yes, but what do you *do* about it?
>
> > I loaded hosaphone-faq.html in Word and confirmed it was an HTML file.
> > At first the translation appeared to be pretty normal. But then I
> > noticed some formatting that was slightly off. The white space wasn't
> > always there.
>
> Eh? What do you mean by 'white space'? HTML doesn't consider whitespace,
> and extra spaces in HTML are pretty much ignored.
>
> > changed the formatting.
> > A line that was indented with 4 hard spaces
> > was deleted while the remaining text in that section was untouched.
>
> Ouch. That's far worse than the expected 'turn 4 hard spaces into a single
> space', or the optimal 'Hmmmm. Maybe he's got the spaces here for a
> reason. I'll just <PRE></PRE> this line' which would cause millions of
> auto-generated HTML documents worldwide to have the first line of every
> paragraph rendered preformatted, since there ARE SO MANY PEOPLE OUT THERE
> WHO DON'T UNDERSTAND TAB STOPS, NEVER MIND PARAGRAPH STYLES! (If any of
> you are wondering what styles are - oh, I hope not - please go read a
> recent book on wordprocessing. Or your manual.)
I feel like I have walked in on Plato writing his Republic here. Who
are you talking to? :-)
>
> HTML 2.0 does not support indentation as such (blank lines are infinitely
> preferable in any case), but deleting text is sufficient cause to trash
> internet assistant, IMO.
I think you have misunderstood my posting to the FAQ-maintainers
mailing list. I posted to share my experiences with others who are
trying to handle the formatting demands for FAQs written in HTML for
Mac users. Not to engage in some sort of techno-jock debate about
silly details about style and formatting. It does not matter what you
feel is and isn't supported to your understanding by HTML. The point,
which you have seemed to miss is that 1)I changed something on the
screen, 2)Saved it out to a new file, 3)Loaded it back into the same
program I saved it from and didn't get the same results. As to be
questioned if I know how to use a word processor or not is pretty
insulting not to mention has nothing to do with subject. Word has built
its reputation on what you see is what you get. Bottom-line, it isn't
doing that. IA trashed its own document and that's a fact.
>
> Why were you using hard spaces for indentation? Normal spaces after
> a return should be acceptable; it sounds to me like you're not familiar
> with the capabilities of your wordprocessor in the way you're generating
> a plain-ASCII FAQ from Word. I'd use tab stops and then replace the
> tabs with the appropriate number of spaces afterwards when I reformat
> to 75 columns.
>
> IMO, using Word to generate an ASCII FAQ is overkill. I gave up on that
> after I realised how many invisible characters Word was inserting in my
> ascii FAQ that didn't show up on the Mac.
Ever hear of word processing? That's what an FAQ is. You write, edit,
print, use spell check, format. If the answer is to use BBedit or
SimpleText, then we need to keep looking for a better solution for Mac
users.
David A. Roth
david@roth-music.com
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