Tagsets — a writer’s extensible punctuation: When sharpening your pencils and getting ready to write etext or tagged text, html’d text in the beginning, two apparent short-comings of eWriter may confront you. All the html tags on menus will work in Netscape Navigator 2.0 and Internet Explorer 3.0, I believe. (Some time ago I lost my copies to try things in.) The Javascript tags will work in both of those browsers. It's Javascript 1.0. One exception. The onMouseOut event came in with 1.1. In 1.1, you can create an array with the New command. The array building template on eWriter’s Javascript menu will work in the Javascript 1.0 browsers.

The second shortcoming is that most of the batch-printed tags do not have attribute templates in them. Some do, of course. The idea was to balance repeated typing with repeated erasing. None of course have attribute values plugged in except where a default is a necessity. The Table tag does have a border="1". It also has cellpadding="" and cellspacing="".

You may wish to write some HTML 4.0 code as well as simpler code I just couldn’t fit onto menus. And you may wish, even with simple code to have multiple copies of a tag with different values for one or more attributes. You could have boilerplate sets with attributes to plug in, but that can get to be a distraction. Tagging is punctuating, and keying or clicking tags should be as straight forward as typing older punctuation marks.

Enter the tagset. See the Tagset menu. Three items are on the menu. Installed Tags... gets an infoplaque explaining the menu’s use. Add Tag (15) will let you add tags one at a time and become familiar with how this works. Remove Tags will give you a drop-down list of tags in the set and you select one to remove it with a click.

In Add Tag, you are told to add the content of the start tag, without the < and the >. if it is an empty tag, you add (at the end) a / if it is an xhtml or xml tag and a > if it is an html tag. These marks are not used except as signals (so you don't need to have a space for xhtml tags). They are chosen to be familiar as parts of their respective tags.

You can begin building a raggedy tagset of tags and tags with attributes you use and that aren’t on the menus. You might have several font tags with different colors or sizes. Any old thing. The reason tagsets contain fifteen tags is so you can key Alt+G to get the menu and then one key, 1 through 9 and A through F. Once you have your raggedy set and are familiar with how tags look on the menu, you can begin building planned, written, and edited tagsets for specific types of writing, specific projects. You don’t want to put in tags one at a time.

Go to Tools/Tagset menu sets. Here you have a dialog to use while you are not actually writing. This gives you the whole tagset that's current and lets you edit it. Export your raggedy tagset. A tslist.set file is created by that export and your set is in it. You were asked for a name and it has that name between square brackets. The next time you click the dialog, that file will be opened and the dialog brought up on top of it.

You can import tagsets you have exported or you can write tagsets in that file. You might export an empty set to get a template. Or, in the file itself, copy one of the sets you have exported, strip the files from it and keep it at the top as [template]. When you know the tags and their use, you can write tagsets rapidly. It's much easier than doing them in the dialog, let alone on the Tagset menu.

With our new extensible (and semantic) punctuation, it pays to know how it works, and to write onto the Tagset menu systems of punctuation.

You still use other plug-in pieces of punctuation marks. The eight boilerplates (one line, of any length, each) can form sets to be exported to and imported from (and written within) bplates.set. This is ideal for attribute sets to be plugged into tags. For larger tag nests, you have super-boilerplates. Finally, you have File/template, which will load .tpt files kept in your eWriter directory.

21st century pencil sharpening is tagset building. Like frame punctuation, it has you looking where you’re going, where you’re going to end up. It has you thinking about the forms of tags you will use, the settings you want, so you can plug in attribute templates and even, in some cases, values.

Warning: Treat the .set files, along with your .ini files, like the family jewels. Any .tpt files you create, too. Back them up on removable media.

Tagset menu eHelp

Tools menu eHelp

Extended typing eHelp