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Sorry for the long break. It won't happen again. :-)
Also a delay while I figured a way to produce HTML this site would be happy with. The French dialogue in the text is enclosed in cite tags like this and is 'dubbed' into English, there being no way to satisfactorily do the subtitling effect.
There are also a few minor changes to the previous chapters.
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Rachel
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Subtitles, etc.
If you needed javascript or something for the subtitles, I could have turned it on for you. Anyone who needs special formatting, ask -- I may be able to do it. :) Or if you need access to pure HTML with no filters, I can turn that on for specific people, too.
I don't leave such stuff turned on all the time because of the possibility of malicious use. Like if you want to load pictures to the server, you have to get a login from me to do that because it is possible for a malicious person to use a .jpg file to cause some havoc. And bad java can give the whole site heartburn. :)
But for genuine contributors, I can give quite a bit of leeway.
- Joyce
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Re: Subtitles, etc.
Well, unfiltered HTML would have helped a bit, as the current settings strip the 'style="css-fragment"' attributes out of HTML tags. I could pretty much compensate for that with a set of sed expressions run over the normal XHTML produced for my site, the results of which are what you see here: the *** between scenes, the ~tiddles~ around character thoughts as per the recent discussion, and converting the paragraph styles for song lyrics and irc/computer text into <blockquote><em> and <code> respectively.
The form of subtitles I was using before on this site was like this: <cite title="English" style="cursor: help; font-style: italic;">Français</cite>". The problem with that was that it broke if there was markup in the English translation (like something emphasised), and there was a small maximum amount of text in the 'title', so if the dialogue was longer than that the translation got clipped, apparently browser-dependent.
Subtitles in the style I have them on my site require a fair amount of support in CSS. In fact they're accomplished entirely in CSS, with a little Javascript hack to enable it to work on IE's broken CSS support. I felt this was over and above the call of duty for anyone else's site; if you disagree we can talk in private about the technicalities and suggestions for CSS/theme support. :-) Besides, the subtitles have met with some degree of reader resistance, particularly in this latest chapter, which has more French dialogue than the previous ones, so I thought I might as well just go for hard-coding the 'dubbed' version. Future chapters after this have much less or no French dialogue in them, so the problem fades away. (Not because of resistance from the readers, but resistance from the characters!)
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Rachel