hen, in early june '95, one howell_g@kosmos.wcc.govt.nz humbly asked the readers of
alt.fan.furry for a little bit of their time because
he had this little writing exercise of his he would like us to read and comment on, I
wasn't quite prepared for 230 Kwords of brilliant fiction that had me glued to the
keyboard with every of its 16 installments, once they arrived. Or a bad case of
literary cold turkey when they, thanks to germany's bad news-lag, didn't, leaving me
hunting the 'net via
ftp or
gopher-news gateways and
other illicit means of virtual travel. Besides being truly captivating, the
story held up well against my collection of Fiction and Fantasy books; even my fourth
reading only dug up minor loose plot points in the Memoirs' Afterword and Epilogue
(which the author admitted to having planted to have a backdoor to sequels
(pantpantpant please...)), typos (which I mercilessly weeded out) and quite a
bit of inconsistent formatting that the HTML Version (and the RTF Version it is based
on, available on request, just mention your platform) you are hopefully about to
read
completely eliminates.Unfortunately, novel-style formatting in HTML V2.0 is next to impossible if your browser doesn't fully support as a character looking precisely the same as space but clinging to non-whitespace characters and being indivisible by word-wrap, which is the way it is specified in ISO 8859-1, which is defined to be the basic character set for HTML V2.0. The unfortunate part is that the only browsers that handle this properly are Arena, Netscape, OmniWeb and lynx, the latter sometimes having problems with either gzip'ed HTML pages or the "zcat" CGI binary. So, until HTML V3.0 support with its <tab to=...> feature (anyone did grok it from the 'specs?) becomes widespread, better stick to Arena, Netscape or OmniWeb.
