Walt Crawford is a charter member of the “I was dialing up Dialog on my 300-baud modem when Al Gore invented the Internet” club, and he’s a great writer, to boot. He quickly dispatches Ashcroft’s lies in the latest issue of Cites & Insights, and is also very funny about RSS, cataloging, OpenURL, and anything else that meanders across his plate.
I know he’s committed to the PDF format… but if he published this newsletter in two formats, PDF and Web-readable, some of us could use Walt to relieve the dreariness of bad meetings by sneaking him on our handhelds. (Not that I would ever do that, of course.)
Posted on this day, other years:
- OCLC's policy: Train, stop, cried the constable on the rails - 2008
- You Know the Moon is in the Seventh House... - 2005
- Blogging and Ethics, Part 3: The Anti-Guidelines - 2004
- Still Life with Gingerbread - 2004
- Nobody Has To Be Nice - 2004
- Blogging and Ethics, Part 3: Matthew Arnold in a Polka-Dot Dress - 2004
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Et tu, Karen?
Thanks for the kind words (well, actually, I was never an online researcher back in those days–but I did do my first programming using patch cords on an IBM 188 Collator, in 1968…). But…
I spell out my reasons for PDF in the C&I FAQ. Those reasons continue to be valid.
And, of course, if I did do HTML, it would be MSWordXPHTML (run away! hide!), since I’m too cheap to spend money on conversion tools, too lazy to learn XML/HTML, and surely too lazy to spend the extra time to do an elegant conversion.
(One reader who’s also a markup expert has actually offered to handle the conversion. So far, I’m not ready to take that offer.)
I’m also (vaguely) aware, thanks to DKS (I shall go no farther in identifying this particular scourge of the internet), that there are programs that can “convert” PDF to a PDA-friendly format. Which puts the burden on those who disagree with my opinion that my essays are too long and too opaquely written to read online: You want to read it that way, you do the conversion.
I’ve been toying with the idea of using the back-TOC page and some cheap Word-to-HTML conversion tool (that is, Word to workable/minimal HTML) to provide *a few* essays in HTML form, possibly with some charitable “you want it, you pay someone else and let me know” mechanism for selecting such articles. But I haven’t made any decisions.
It continues to be the case that, just as soon as some body signs up to underwrite Cites & Insights and says “but only if you also provide an XML/XHTML/HTML version,” there will be such a version. The Marylaine Block “I do this free as publicity for paid speaking & writing gigs” philosophy hasn’t been working out, since I’ve been doing fewer speeches since starting C&I, perhaps through overexposure?
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