M1 v2 Reposting Schedule

[z...@tampaad.net]

I just got an email from LJ, the webmaster at SOL. Today's chapter
of M1 will not be posted today. My 'solution' to the site's poor text
formatting is causing too much trouble and he's gonna try something
else. It should go up tomorrow morning.
(Hopefully his solution is 'stop butchering the text that gets
submitted, it's already properly formatted so just let it go through
as-is'.)

For those not following this saga, SOL enforces 'minimal HTML' which
eliminates all 'extra' whitespace (spaces, tabs, hidden characters,
etc). Because of this, 'ASCII Art' like the following battle formation:

Eric
Sam Cindy George
Margie Matt

gets posted as:

Eric
Sam Cindy George
Margie Matt

In an effort to get around this, I've started taking screen-shot
pictures of my original text, then submitting my story with an embedded
picture, which is nothing more than... a PNG of the properly-formatted
text. That particular fix as shown above replaces 50-some-odd bytes of
text in the middle of a text file with a 5KB graphic which HAS to add to
the storage, transfer, and processing load on both server and browser.
And, of course, it doesn't work on the site's 'phone mode'.
-ZM

[thinkin...@gmail.com]

Count on you to break things! Getting advice from Mike?

Thinker

--
For questions regarding canon and the history of the Swarm Cycle, first visit the Swarm Cycle Wiki at https://tampaad.net
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "swarm-authors" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to swarm-author...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/swarm-authors/f1ae7320544b4c7b1538381870142dab%40tampaad.net.

[z...@tampaad.net]

   I didn't break nuthin', boss!

 

   I merely...set up a public demonstration of some rather short-sighted website policies.  I mean, back in the '80s with 320KB floppy drives and 300-baud modems, saving storage space and transfer time was important, but I think that 40 years later we've grown beyond that now.  We can afford to waste a few bytes on formatting.

 

   It may have been the fact that I went to all the trouble to create and upload PNGs that demonstrated, at a storage cost of 100 to 1, what we should be doing.

 

   Anyway, LJ has created (or activated) a formatting code that tells the text input processor to ignore this text, these aren't the droids you're looking for.  It seems to be working right, so I'm gonna revise the revision to take the pictures out and make them text again.

[Mike Omelanuk]

Me? Break things?

I'm thinkin' about trying to break the new Gmail AI button "help me write". Kids can't read cursive - next they won't be able to write.

Mike

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/swarm-authors/07e601dd194f%244d00ed00%24e702c700%24%40gmail.com.