I’ve often said the only activism even vaguely appealing to me is open information standards.
That’s not to say no one has any business with privacy and encryption, but I don’t need those things for my work. Sure, I need time with relative quiet in meat space, and I’m often tempted to leave the house and sit in the public library with my laptop. But once my thoughts are expressed in digital form, it’s time to splash it out there for the world to see. I live solely to participate in revelation.
Thus, my fleshly nature loves word processors, but my calling demands neutral formats. Frankly, most of what I do could be in plain text. But when it involves linking, significant footnoting, or anything more than plain text, HTML is plenty good. To be precise, XHTML with printer formatting included in the rolled-in style sheet (CSS) is about as much “word processor” as I need.
And I don’t mean complicated, kludgy XHTML code, but clean and standards-compliant. So if I were to use a “word processor” it wouldn’t be MS Office or even Libre Office/Open Office. Both of those spit out some really ugly junk when saving as HTML. I might consider using Kompozer/Composer (part of the Mozilla suite of products), but even that tends to be a bit clunky. So far, the best in terms of code clarity is Amaya, but I’d have to build it from source because the binary releases for Debian aren’t keeping up with security updates. Nobody in the Debian world manages it as a package. (Edit: It’s no longer developed, but the Windows version should work just fine.)
So I’m left with mostly hand-coding, which is fine. I can write like that on-the-fly for the simple stuff I do. I keep a collection of code clippings and templates around to save time. It’s not hard to find that stuff if you decide to learn how to write in XHTML. Just get yourself any good “for dummies” level of introduction and in just a couple of weeks you’ll be whipping it out like a webmaster.
It’s not so much that I love doing things this way; I don’t. I love having a stack of word processors to suit my moods, but that’s not where it’s at. I keep a copy of MS Office 97 simply because it works well with WINE on Linux and I do need the nudging about grammar now and then. So I tend to write the text in a plain old text editor (Geany, Notedpad++, Gvim, Joe etc.) and paste the text into Word 97 for a grammar review. Once I’m satisfied with the draft, I churn out first a copy in HTML, then blocked out plain text, and only after that do I actually produce something for Smashwords if needed.
All my stuff is free because it’s all about the message. I have no other reason to keep sucking up the oxygen.
