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A Digression on Form and Discontent
Just as no good deed goes unpunished, a strong case can also be made that no religiously motivated act doesn't wind up punishing somebody ... sometimes more than once. That insight stems from the consequences of my somewhat reluctant, but on the whole well motivated, decision to allow myself to be talked into using "cascading style sheets" in order to be able to exercise more control over how readers will see the results of all this foolishness. As mentioned in the "About" section, the decision was made because my old friend Bill convinced me that there were good technotheological reasons for doing it. That is, on "Religious" grounds, several apparent HTML mechanisms (i.e., insiders such as Bill know it turns out that they aren't real HTML mechanisms, in that they aren't actually approved, official aspects of the HTML specification) that might be used to control appearance ought to be shunned because they turn out to have been invented by either the Evil Empire itself (no, sports fans, not the Bronx Bastids; the Redmond Ratfinks, in this context) or one of its onetime competitors and forced on the public in cardtrickster fashion to drum up business for themselves by being incompatible with the competitor's browser, thus promoting their own browser if and when they're incautiously adopted by "content providers". (Speaking of theses, there might well be an interesting Business Ethics Master's in the analysis of which is the more sleazy, the HTML sabotage by the software swine or the insertion of "chips" to prevent generic ink cartridges' being used in printers by the hardware swine ... if "Business Ethics" weren't at best an oxydullnormal in first place, anyway. And while I'll resist the temptation to launch into a sermon on the topic of the Evils of defacing other people's art in order to promote one's own profit, those interested might well spend some time thinking about that very point, to their profit, as it were.) So not wanting to give aid and comfort to the enemy, once that had been explained to me I replied with something along the lines of "Oh, I didn't know it was Technotheological" and wound up going to what turned out to be a great deal of trouble to retrofit cascading style sheets to the HTML version of the thesis that existed at the time. That turned out to be the first punishment. Skip ahead to a day or two before I'd planned to do the mass mailing to announce that The Thesis was at last available for viewing. That's when Bill discovered that in the particular browser he was using for checking out the final version (at my request, as a "beta test"), things didn't look right at all. Lines were squnched together, italicized words were overstruck and messy in general, and something funny happened to most of the margins, to name only those glitches which come to mind at the moment. To run close to the ragged edge of being the sort of person who bites heads off chickens as part of his circus act, what happened was he was using Netscape 4.70 [or maybe 4.73] as one of his testing tools, whereas I had been using Netscape 4.79 as one of mine, and the latter, while it didn't exactly do the style sheets stuff right, didn't make things look ridiculously bad, so I was willing to settle. Figuring out what to do about that occasioned me a great deal of concern and wasted a fair amount of time until I got lucky and discovered once I fired up an older version of Netscape I happened to have around, "for completeness", that if JavaScript were not enabled--which is, in fact, the state I usually keep it in, having been against JavaScript on religious grounds well before I was converted to the cascading style sheets persuasion--the bad behavior ceased. So you might think the principle should merely be that few religious acts don't wind up punishing somebody, but it turns out that there were other anomalies that even turning JavaScript off didn't "work around" and I wound up having to remove the stylesheets after all. Second punishment. And then, of course, there was one more anomaly that required putting a highly abbreviated stylesheet back in, at the cost of still more time, energy, and stress on both sundry body parts and what's left of my mind. Third punishment. Who knows whether I've fixed all the funnies. By Murphy's Law, almost certainly not. At any rate, aside from presenting the opening philosophical insight, the other reason for bothering with this digression is a desire to let you know that I know that "your smileage may vary", as I like to paraphrase the techie cliche'. In other words, I've done all I could bring myself to do to smooth things out, but your quality of viewing experience will depend a great deal on which browser you're using. You probably should already know that browsers matter, I daresay, but since not everybody who reads The Thesis will be an experienced computer user, it seemed worth stating explicitly. Semifinally, as might but shouldn't go without saying, I do of course offer my apologies to those of you who turn out not to have a browser that does let you see the document in a reasonably clean fashion. Here's hoping, though, that the resulting viewing experience won't wind up being too unsatisfactory for too many readers.... (Note well that I'm only talking about your reactions to the Form; nothing I can do about how you react to the Content other than to remind you The Thesis itself was written more than 43 years ago, as I digress in December of 2003.) And as perhaps could and should go without saying, if you have a fairly "new" browser, presentation sorts of things should work out all right. But as is in fact quite well worth saying, if it's an "Internet Explorer" version you're using, new or old, other, non-presentation, things might well work out very badly ... since security flaws in "IE" are arguably the most-exploited avenues of attack by "hackers". So think about that, too. (I call it Innernut Extorter, myself; but I did check The Thesis out--while not connected to the 'Net, of course--with a copy of IE5, I guess it was, I never got around to deleting, and another "beta-tester" used IE6, and at least those two cybersieves do appear to give the "look" I want, finally ... even though it was for Innernut's sake that I had to reintroduce the skeletal stylesheets--as what I dearly hope will prove to be the final punishment for the original religiously motivated action.) Not to leave you with the wrong impression, though, please don't get me wrong: Some technotheological Holy Wars are worth fighting, irrespective of punishment. The Us (righteous adherants of TCP/IP-based internetting, rooted in the sacred, properly Descriptive, ARPANET Reference Model--a/k/a the Old Network Boys) vs. Them (deluded worshippers of the diabolical, obscenely Prescriptive, "ISO Reference Model"--a/k/a the ISORMites) one comes immediately to mind. Even if I would have made a lot more money off The Book (despite only getting royalties on every other copy sold) if I'd been able to bring myself to sup with the Devil.... But we digress from the digression.
©2003 Michael A. Padlipsky. All rights reserved. |