From: hart@vmd.cso.uiuc.edu (Michael Hart)
Newsgroups: misc.handicap
Subject: Looking Back from 12/31/92
Date: 8 Jan 93 13:58:21 GMT
Reply-To: hart@vmd.cso.uiuc.edu (Michael Hart)
X-Fidonet: Split
Originator: wtm@sheldev.shel.isc-br.com

Index Number: 26999

[Forwarded from the PACS-L mailing list by Patt Bromberger]

[Some parts of this posting have been deleted]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------

Comments from December 31, 1991        About Ideas From the Past

Contents

**Form Versus Content. . .The Eternal Battle is Finally Ending**

**"Drinking from a Firehose". . .I Dare You to Say that Again!**

**Easy Storage Versus Easy Access. . .Compression Versus ASCII**
"Send Them the Sourcecode". . .I Dare You, Too, Say that Again!*

**Moderators Should be Moderate. . .Should They Not?
"This Will Be the Last Posting on the Subject"

Part 1
**Form Versus Content. . .The Eternal Battle is Finally Ending**

Margination. . .Form Versus Content. . .We Have a New Winner and
the Winner is. . . . . . . . .the reader!

Can we really stay with incompatible forms of Desktop Publishing
programs that require expensive computers to see or print them??
In the short run we will stay with Plain Vanilla ASCII for email
and other things that must read a wide audience, but for narrow,
narrower, narrowest communications there may be an advantage for
using media other people won't be willing or able to read.

Paper printing has spent an inordinate amount of time and energy
on preparing manuscripts for publication in the matter of form a
page takes and on margins for those pages.

The amount of time and energy has been SO great that we take for
granted most of what we see on the printed page, except perhaps,
when it become ridiculously obvious in newspaper columns when it
happens that one line has twice as many letters as the following
line. . .a n d  t h e  p r i n t e r s  a d d  a  s p a c e  t o
each position in the line to justify the margination once more--
just as other professions go out of their way to justify similar
idiosyncracies of their own.

However, with electronic text there is no need for pages at all,
and using varied margins does not cost paper, the expense of the
paper is the idiosyncratic cause of the thousands of hyphens all
over the average book.  You are probably so used to it that your
mind skips over it, but take a look and you will find the margin
is justified at the expense of 10% of the lines being hyphenated
to accommodate the saving of perhaps 1 or 2% of the paper (If an
example page had 50 lines and it would cost an entire line. . .a
not terribly great prospect. . .then the book would be 2% longer
in pages to eliminate all the extra hyphenation; if the page for
the example contained 100 lines, then 1% more pages would do it.

Just as there is no need for pagination with scrolls or with the
electronic equivalent, so, too, there is no need for margination
.. . .as the number of characters is the same to contain articles
with an average of 65 characters. . .whether the margins are all
the same, such as in this article, or whether half the lines are
75 characters and the other half are 55 characters, and none are
actually 65 characters.

For those of you who have wondered about my margination, I would
be easily willing to tell you half the reason for it. . .I would
write on early word processors that justified the margins with a
method similar to the newspaper example above, by the insertions
of spaces between words to create the justification.  You can do
this still with most word processors today, but at least most of
them will insert the spaces where you can see them (WYSIWYG. . .
What You See Is What You Get). . .but. . .there were no WYSIWYGs
back then, so I learned to write in manners that Let Me See What
I Was Going To Get. . .as I wanted to determine the phraseology,
not have the computer do it for me.

As far as _I_ am concerned, Desktop Publishing has focused quite
enough on fonts, form, margination, proportional spacing and the
antiquated 8 1/2 by 11 inch format. . .so much, in fact, that an
electronic text from Desktop Publishing output is so messy in an
Etext of the Plain Vanilla ASCII that it is often pretty useless
unless presented in the Desktop Publishing program.

The second reason has to do with the 81 pages of rules about the
FORM of my thesis, including margination right to left, top from
bottom, and much, much, much more.

At any rate, electronic texts will eliminate the needs for pages
and margins to be regulated. . .although people will continue to
regulate them for years to come, and programs will allow authors
of theses and other works to write while thinking only about the
CONTENT of what they write, and then translate it into the FORMs
required by this officialdom or that one with ease.  In the past
it used to be a major requirement that the authors spend totally
inordinate amounts of time or money. . .or both. . .on "Payments
of Dues" proving they were really interested enough in admission
to the cliques of those who had already done so.

Why is form prevalent over content?  Because those power people,
who earned their power the old-fashioned way, are afraid the new
people will outstrip them with less effort, since the new people
have new tools.  Some professors of Shakespeare don't like their
new students being able to look up "To be or not to be," seconds
after typing it into a computer search program. . .while another
type of Shakespeare professor sees this as a way of furthering a
limited access to their favorite author to an unlimited access--
and to an unlimited audience.

The difference is that some professors are true teachers in true
fashion as was Geoffrey Chaucer's "Oxford Scholar," who was said
to be the kind of man who "would gladly learn and gladly teach,"
("And gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche," the exact quote)
while other professors have a different philosophy that has been
described as that of "A Cat Guarding the Cream" (Huber, 1992).

At any rate, you may notice that some of the etext I have edited
for Project Gutenberg have a minimal number of hyphens and also,
widows and orphans have been minimized in pagination/margination
and also in phraseology. . .i.e. many more of our lines end with
the end of a sentence, a comma, etc., and rarely begin with only
one word from the previous line.

Thus begins the end of the tyranny of FORM OVER CONTENT as it is
practiced today in the art of publishing.

[remainder of articles deleted]

So much for the past, but I like the direction we have come. . .
and tomorrow, in 1993, I will write something about the future--

Happy New Year!

=====================================================

Thank you for your interest,

Michael S. Hart, Professor of Electronic Text
Executive Director of Project Gutenberg Etext
Illinois Benedictine College, Lisle, IL 60532
No official connection to U of Illinois--UIUC
hart @uiucvmd.bitnet or hart@vmd.cso.uiuc.edu

--- End of forwarded message from "Michael S. Hart"
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