10 June 2003
Text on the web is just that, text. Unless it’s stuffed into images or locked into PDFs, pretty much all of the text you view in your browser is either HTML or plain text.
Now, I post to this weblog via a very simple form which does no formatting. I’m not a fan of typing into textareas: they’re never a comfortable size and don’t even offer the features of Notepad. I want something that I can edit this text in, that will spellcheck what I write (I’m a good speller but a terrible typist), give me proper punctuation, and won’t show me whatever markup there is. I want to edit the text, not the markup.
My system — or solution to this problem — is clunky and complex, but comfortable. I write in Word, because it provides the most natural environment for writing on a PC. I use styles, so my documents don’t have as much presentational junk as most Word documents do, and I save them as RTF, because it allows me to edit it in a text editor if the worst comes to the worst (and then some).
Once I’ve done this, I need to take this text and convert it into HTML, or XHTML as the case may be. I could do this with Word’s HTML output function, but I really don’t want to be doing that. Instead I do one of two things: I run it through Textile, or to be precise vbsTextile, so I eat my own dogfood; or I copy it in to TextPad and use some macros I’ve defined to add things like links and entify everything.
Things like links.
Links are what makes the web go round, and I default to writing without them. If I insert them in Word, it looks ugly and doesn’t really benefit me anyway because I’m just copying the displayed text to somewhere else, not the link itself. Sometimes I’ll add them just to remind myself where certain bits of text should point to, but not often. So I have to go through the text afterwards and add links later. This is hardly ideal, but I can live with it. When I try to write something with images, then I’ll complain.