The first one had a huge "comment" above the HTML start tag that with the end tag embraces the "whole letter." That's because the eletter shows up first in the mailer text reader (a read only text editor). It explained how to get the letter into a browser. Just about every browser, of course, will show text that's above the HTML tag pair. And rumor had it that some mailers would, in time, work as browsers. So I wrapped that comment in a pair of PRE tags and replaced the left angle bracket of each line with its print code. (See the Keys or Txt Keys menu.)
In a browser, then, you'll see that comment looking as it looks in the mailer. The whole thing is sort of ponderous. BrowsOgram or car page indeed. As you can see if you look at this eletter (that's what it is), you c'n see that I've slimmed everything down considerably. I keep boilerplates for a top and a bottom line. The top line, above would be everything from the HTML tag through the BODY tag. Here, I popped the HEAD tags apart to put in a title so the browser will show that "To ... From ..." line. If you are reading this in reader.htm, the "book shell," you won't see that because the letter is in a frame. Open this directly in your browser and you will see it.
If you're seeing this in the mailer, or view source in your browser, or have this in eWriter (or PocketPad) and are putting it into the browser from there, you'll see that in the "text" version, the paragraphs are indented. That puts most of the tags into a gutter and out of the text pretty much. Inline tags, of course, belong in the text. Browsers won't care about text file line ends or indents made with spaces as eWriter and PocketPad and any good DOS editor does. Notepad will put in #9s and I don't know how browsers react to them. But in eWriter (and PPad), you c'n get that indent with tab. You keep the indent by anticipating word-wrap (or turning it off) and using Shift+Return to end your line with the indent. If your line wraps and you type a word or two at the margin, hit Home, Ctrl+Tab, and End. In thirty minutes you're typing "at speed." You can set your tab interval on the fly.
In eletters.htm, and in all these "concept papers," I try to keep the idea up in front of you that HTML is used as a writer's tool (using a text editor) rather than as an editor's or publisher's toll (using what is usually called an HTML editor). Thinking of the tags as punctuation marks will affect your underlying and for the most part hidden assumptions, and it'll affect how you write. In fact, if you've used some of the HTML editors that are around, would you want to write in one of them?
So, it makes a difference to think of the tags as punctuation marks, and of using the tags as marking your text as you go. Given the typing assist by one of these ewriters (eWriter or PPad) or eTypewriters, you c'n pretty well use them as you do commas and semicolons, dashes and ellipses, and email italics (*|*). Now, in fact, like the email italics, the HTML italics are also punctuation, signaling the reader not of a pause but of a voice shift.
And I think that by now the idea of a "distributed" typewriter is becoming more familiar. Using one piece of software to type the letter and another to screen and print it.
At this point, you c'n begin to sense that changing the way you think about things tends to subtly shift the way you perceive things. You get a glimpse of the world we're going to be living (and writing) in very shortly.
You might think of the letter in the browser as "published" in a sense. It c'n "show" some of what you'd see on a magazine page, in a book, or on a "web page" made in HTML editors or more complex applications. And the letter in a text editor or mailer is the familiar manuscript.
In the software world, the builders talk about two parts of a program; they call these "engine" and "interface." The interface is the part you, the user, deal with. The "engine" is down in the innards and does some kind of work. Thinking about our new sort of writing, with manuscript and publication as the two end results, be can borrow these terms. The publication in the browser is the "interface" with which the reader interacts. The manuscript supplies the text (and its embedded elements) and directions for that publication in its tagging or punctuating. The manuscript has always been an "engine," driving (through editors, typesetters, page designers) the end publishing or displaying of "what was in the manuscript.
Now, with our "distributed" typewriter, the manuscript is more directly the engine. I'm not talking about "dynamic" HTML or XML and the "cascading style sheets" and all that vendors questing for proprietary power push at us. The writer, building the "engine" or typing a "manuscript," simply utilizes what sane users and their browser suppliers do to keep a stable "set of habits" writers can count on. The I tags will signal entering and exiting a voice shift. The H# tags will mark off a "headline" probably rendered as larger and darker type. But in those simple directings the manuscript shapes what's "read."
The shaping goes far beyond this, of course, even if we consider only what will pass on through to paper copies. the engine can install images, can handle blocks of text differently, and so forth. And much can be included or that will be readable only on screen. Animation, video. sound, of course. End notes will print. Footnotes have to be treated as end notes because the writer can't predict how the whole will fit on pages. People talk of web "pages," but this is confusing terminology. What you have out there are web "scrolls." The collection is less like the Library of Congress with its books that are bound cut-pages, than the Library of Alexandria, with its bins of scrolls that researchers could unroll and copy out by hand to carry away.
What's not so obvious is that these varied end results and the handling of them ...lead to different ways of reading and making use of what's there to read. In a browser, of course, you read both screened publication and manuscript, using View Source to bring up the manuscript copy. Given a reader who's a writer (and we grow up studying reading and writing), that reader c'n go into the engine and write in his or her own "marginalia" or do other things to a personal copy, a copy that's to be returned for its marginalia, or a copy that's to be forwarded with or after the original.
What I'm trying to drive home here is that this "dual" or "layered" writing (and reading) leads to a very different way of handling, reading, and using "printed matter" that c'n be printed in different ways and media. I'm only grazing the surface of this altered "mind" nearly everybody will possess ...as a new "literacy" evolves.
All my "batch typing" in PocketPad and eWriter from the beginning has been to give the writer profoundly new punctuation to use. The underlying idea is to create ease and speed (and linearity) of use so that writing is never stopped for insertion is not slowed any more than I c'n help. If you want to write in an image, you press Ctrl+NumPad2. Now, that won't quite be the end of it, like typing comma. But unlike HTML editors, I don't give you dialog for filling out the "parameters" for an image load. I give a sequence of InputQuery boxes, they come up one after another. Only three and you'll likely blank the third. The two are the url and a bit of text that's available if the image isn't. You can give only the SRC. (Of course, you can go back later and plug in other parameters if you want.) It's very like punctuation.
This "new reality" way of keying punctuation marks is, itself, very powerful. You don't need to vary a comma, to show the nature of the pause. If you want to shade the stock comma, you do this by handling the context. You've seen me type comma, space, ellipsis into word. I use batch typing for the ellipsis, Ctrl+E. Type the three periods with one keying. So for a heading style hit Ctrl+H. An InputQuery takes a number, 1 to 6. Or if you want "hard spaces" hit Ctrl+V and you'll be asked "How many?".
In any ewriter.zip containing this essay, you'll find a menu named XML. In PocketPad I may put it in one that goes before I've implemented this menu, so if you don't find the menu look for a bumped version to following along fairly soon.
Actually, I've a number of pseudo-XML batch typing on that menu and everything will work in Navigator 2.x, the Mosaic out then, and Internet Explorer 3.x that "matched" NN2's frames and Javascript 1.0 and all. XML or "extensible markup language" allows an intranet manager (or anyone else) to define tags, use them on web scrolls, and have apps that work with those tags or a browser that will work with tags defined by the method that browser requires. Our etypewriter, everyone's ewriter, is not going to get caught up in that turf-grabbing proprietorship while I c'n help it.
But I was looking at the examples of its use in an article on XML I picked up at a site given over to the subject. And I thought, ...cool. This isn't one, but it's the same sort of thing. And it was the first one I put on the XML menu.
Suppose you're writing a letter or report or something else and email addresses are scattered through it. you'd like each address to, in fact, be a clickable and the HREF="mailto:xxxxxxx" to be under it. Now, you c'n use Anchor (Ctrl+NumPad1) each time and it's not too much work, particularly if you put the "mailto:" in a boilerplate. Still, it's a bother over the whole writing assignment. I'd guess that using XML, you'd just type the address once and the tag would take care of typing it twice and with the whole "pair of A tags and content."
So, I emulated that. Each time you are going to type an email address in that eletter, click the menu item. type the address once in the box, hit enter, ...and it's done. No new tags, no proprietary handler and no waiting for the super new browsers. The seven items on that menu as I write this are all useful compact operations like that. See xml.htm for more on the items and the whole idea of automated handlings.
The trick in becoming a cyberwriter is to become at home with this "three-ply" written material, as it exists in the "engine" or "manuscript" and in, at least, two printings, ...the printing "on paper" and the more ephemeral and modifiable one "on screen."
Gene Fowler
February, 1998