“In the beginning...” we thought of this as a virtual front porch, with a mail box out at the end of the drive- and walkway to the street. (bottom of the scroll). Then, picking up a mouse and traveling, it came to seem, not a home page, but a garage page.
Over time, it came to seem less a place, virtual or actual, than a way for people to talk. The “place” metaphor looks back, toward the Nineteenth century, not forward into the Twenty-first - and a place might be a state of mind. We, April and Gene, not Delphie, have written or created these scrolls, called pages by those who think in terms of cut sheets, and now we sense everything “out here” as the new reading and writing, listening and speaking, seeing and showing. True, it all wears amazing skins, but underneath, it’s the pure hum of human talk.
A while back, I, Gene, came to feel strongly that given the ubiquity of web browsers and the powerful global linking of e-mail, Everyman’s (and -woman’s) e-word processor was an “ordinary” text editor (not too different from an old hardware typewriter, which, in software, would be a textwriter) plus these wondrous instruments for screening and printing. Type up your manuscript in a textwriter, and use the browser to produce typeset copy. Even your e-letters could be written in this way, e-mailed, and the recipient could put them into a browser.
The insight tugging at my eye-corners was to see HTML tags not as a layout designer’s marks for page design, but as punctuation marks with which to “phrase and accent” text, a new and very inclusive text, while composing it.
The idea is to write an e-mail letter with HTML punctuation and mail it with GIFs and other “pieces” zipped into an “attachment” to go with the e-letter. (This makes the e-mailed letter an auto-mobile page...and suggests that our page be a garage page, though I don’t use HTML for all my e-mail.) Remembering the web, if you have a home site, you can skip the attachment package and link to signatures, illustrations, and other items you keep at your site ...or any place else.
How can you write this way? Well, you must become familiar with a handful of HTML tags, of course. But not too many. And you don’t want an HTML editor because these are for lay-out designers, and you can’t write naturally in one.
Well, over
the years word processors and, more importantly, mail program
composers have come to let you write html-punctuated text and even
do some of the embedding and cross-linking. What you lose that you
had in a text editor, that I then made easy to type, is the feel
for almost hand-crafted manuscript followed by magically quick and
professional typesetting amd display of the published result.
You type Ctrl+I and, instead of laying down italic type until you
turn it off, you get a pair of tags and are writing between
them until you key a jump over the end-italics tag. This is
manuscript. Then, you pull in any of your browsers (with a
couple mouse clicks) and it's typeset your file for you and is
displaying what you want your reader to see.
If you don't care about this,
but are writing in your mail composer and have a mail program that
let's you get at the underlying source (Outlook Express, though not
Outlook, for MS users), you can paste in your whole page or
chunks of it. And do some things you can't do working up on the
surface
Anyway, no more pasting
manuscript onto the scroll to be grabbed up by the recipient and
stuffed into a browser.
Want to read about eWriter?: introduction to eWriter.
Well, what-do-yuh-know? Here’s that mail box at the end of the driveway, after all. And a few “cars” parked here, too.
| Mail Box | "Out of the typewriter" - a round of poems from sixties and seventies Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco.... | Check out eWriter? A 21st century textwriter - free for any to use. | The e-“bound galley proofs” of FIRES: Selected Poems 1963 - 1976, 2002+ Revised, Expanded & Annotated Edition and a "mind and times" archive of Gene's poems and thought. |