Old Tim wasn't too blame for everything.
The www was a convention introduced by early webmasters, when there
were like 3 addresses in the internet. It stems from the UNIX
convention that a server should have a sub-address which reflected
it's function. Thus, you used to have post.sun.com or smtp.sun.com or
gopher.sun.com or ... you get the drift. www is an artifact which
seems to have stuck.
Normalisation of space as it's called. isn't a HTML thing - it's a
SGML thing, of which HTML is a subset or extension.
spacebar == &nbrsp; in HTML. When I was webmaster for the CCCP, I used
to have a script which processed text files of the poems. This script
counted spaces *internal* to the line, and then inserted the right
number of non-breaking spaces in the line. I'd then run another script
which converted this tx file to my XML and ran a XSLT script which
converted it to XHTML. Simple!!!
Abiword used to insert &nbrsp; I think - can't remember off hand. Umm.
My spacings isn't as complex as some of the CCCP stuff. Also, my stuff
on the CCCP website has long since been traduced and screwed over.
Bastards.
Roger
On 9/26/08, John Tranter <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> The problem is that HTML is designed to collapse any number of sequential
> spacebar characters into one spacebar character. (Please ask Sir Tim
> Berners-Lee why he did that: and while you're at it, why he forced everyone to
> add "www." to the front of every internet address. The man is a criminal.)
>
> (Joke.)
>
> You can do what you like in a word processor (an OpenOffice is a wonderful
> Word Processor, for those who are prepared to learn its "Styles" and
> "Navigator" features), but when you convert any word processor text to HTML,
> the multiple spacebar characters disappear and are converted into one
> spacebar character. HTML does that, not your word processor.
>
> To do what you wish to do, you really need to use an HTML editor, not a word
> processor. Use the tool appropriate to the job at hand, they say.
>
> Jacket magazine's style guide has a long, detailed, boring and essential
> explanation of all that stuff:
>
> http://jacketmagazine.com/00/styleguide.shtml
>
> best
>
> John Tranter
>
--
My Stuff: http://www.badstep.net/
"I began to warm and chill
to objects and their fields"
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