RANT: Word rapes fanfic

[campylobacter]

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, developed HTML back in 1991 so that different computer platforms could read documents consistently, with clear paragraph breaks, italics, bold, smart quotes, and other typographical luxuries.

WHY THE FUCKING HELL, in 2010, do I need to use $300 Dreamweaver software to generate clean HTML? And where the fuck did I misplace my installation CD so I can load Dreamweaver onto my new iMac?

Why can't Microsoft export a simply formatted story, with nothing more complex than italics and smart quotes, into HTML that doesn't fucking DOUBLE the filesize? WTF. Div tags? Seriously? SERIOUSLY? Motherfucking div tags with useless class formatting attributes instead of a simple paragraph tag?

W. T. F?

WHAT THE FUCK?

Also, why the fucking hell do I go through weird differences between LJ/DW, Heliopolis, Wraithbait, All Daniel Fic, AO3, and Area 52 in the way they accept submissions/entries? WTF.

Copy-pasting just DOESN'T work consistently between them; their Javascript routines auto-format whatever I paste into the HTML window and spit out a weird hybrid HTML that works with whatever version of eFiction or Ruby or PHP processing.

Also, WTF with 2 break tags instead of opening and closing paragraph tags. WTF? That's not even remotely semantic.

Fuck fuck fuckitty FUCK.

OK, I'm done now.

Comments

[campylobacter.livejournal.com]

Thank you! Where were those links that when I needed them?

I used Dreamweaver for data tables and Word HTML cleaning. Going dynamic & CSS3 kinda makes Dreamweaver obsolete.

I use TextEdit & Text Wrangler on my Mac, but when I have to open, edit & export the Microsoft Word files people keep sending me, I'm at the mercy of Microsoft. OMG, if I could persuade everyone to stop using MS Word, I would be ecstatic.

[spiletta42.livejournal.com]

I always code everything by hand. I'm much happier that way.

[campylobacter.livejournal.com]

There's no way in holy hell I would ever construct a data table by hand. I applaud you. Edit a table, yes. Build a 20x8 from scratch? That's a recipe for mis-nesting tags and hours wasted in tears for me.

However, I will spend hours hand-typing CSS stylesheets, so I understand the nerd happy, there.

[spiletta42.livejournal.com]

OCD > common sense

[campylobacter.livejournal.com]

LOL indeed!