I've had a couple of stories bounced because I had some unacceptable HTML tags in them. That's fine; I'm not complaining at all. However, when I tried to find some official information about that, I couldn't find a really authoritative source. I searched these forums and found some posts on the subject that seemed pretty confident, but they didn't exactly agree, and in any case, depending on forum posts for official information is dicey unless you can be certain they really do come from an official source and not just a user posting a very confidently-worded opinion.
The bounce says:
"We allow bolds, italics, underlines, and centered text. We do not do indentation, font face changes, or font color changes. Please remove all such HTML tags, repaste the fixed story into this form, then hit SUBMIT."
This statement seems pretty clear (although you must first submit a story that gets rejected for unacceptable HTML to see it). Yet this post http://forum.literotica.com/showpost.php?p=19844938&postcount=2 says that <blockquote> is OK too. In any case, even though it has an official kind of ring to it, it's still just a forum post that might be accurate, and might not.
It's very understandable that Literotica would want to stick to a particular look and feel and prevent overenthusiastic HTML-jockeys (which includes me sometimes, but not here) from turning story postings into their ideas of graphic splendor, or injecting broken HTML and all the browser pathologies that might provoke. On the other hand, HTML in submissions has a lot of advantages: unlike word-processor files, which require a lot of crunching overhead, and formatting requests in Notes requiring editors to manually process them, plain text is the simplest, fastest and lowest-overhead format for submission, and when such submissions include some HTML tags, all the site software has to do is detect unapproved tags, which is nearly trivial in both up-front programming and runtime overhead.
What would be great is something easy to find right up front, preferably in either the official Submission Guidelines (http://www.literotica.com/subguide.shtml) or the related FAQ (http://www.literotica.com/faq/05235347.shtml) that spells out exactly what HTML is considered OK, and also what to do when a particular story has an unusual need that some unapproved HTML might satisfy.
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In the story that was just rejected for HTML problems, it looks like the offending HTML tag was probably <hr/>, which puts a horizontal line across the page at that point. I think that would be a good one to approve. Stories often have distinct breaks in the flow, or other natural interruptions. Typically they are handled, if they are at all, by something like I did here above, with that short row of equal signs. Some use dashes, or asterisks, but the idea is the same, to show that there is some kind of boundary there, either a jump in the timeline, a change of location, or focus, or something else a writer wants to clearly mark.
The <hr/> tag is designed for just those cases. Unlike HTML, like font face or color changes or unusual formatting, this tag only draws a hairline across the page at the place where it's located. It has no global impact anywhere else. I suggest it be considered acceptable.
The bounce says:
"We allow bolds, italics, underlines, and centered text. We do not do indentation, font face changes, or font color changes. Please remove all such HTML tags, repaste the fixed story into this form, then hit SUBMIT."
This statement seems pretty clear (although you must first submit a story that gets rejected for unacceptable HTML to see it). Yet this post http://forum.literotica.com/showpost.php?p=19844938&postcount=2 says that <blockquote> is OK too. In any case, even though it has an official kind of ring to it, it's still just a forum post that might be accurate, and might not.
It's very understandable that Literotica would want to stick to a particular look and feel and prevent overenthusiastic HTML-jockeys (which includes me sometimes, but not here) from turning story postings into their ideas of graphic splendor, or injecting broken HTML and all the browser pathologies that might provoke. On the other hand, HTML in submissions has a lot of advantages: unlike word-processor files, which require a lot of crunching overhead, and formatting requests in Notes requiring editors to manually process them, plain text is the simplest, fastest and lowest-overhead format for submission, and when such submissions include some HTML tags, all the site software has to do is detect unapproved tags, which is nearly trivial in both up-front programming and runtime overhead.
What would be great is something easy to find right up front, preferably in either the official Submission Guidelines (http://www.literotica.com/subguide.shtml) or the related FAQ (http://www.literotica.com/faq/05235347.shtml) that spells out exactly what HTML is considered OK, and also what to do when a particular story has an unusual need that some unapproved HTML might satisfy.
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In the story that was just rejected for HTML problems, it looks like the offending HTML tag was probably <hr/>, which puts a horizontal line across the page at that point. I think that would be a good one to approve. Stories often have distinct breaks in the flow, or other natural interruptions. Typically they are handled, if they are at all, by something like I did here above, with that short row of equal signs. Some use dashes, or asterisks, but the idea is the same, to show that there is some kind of boundary there, either a jump in the timeline, a change of location, or focus, or something else a writer wants to clearly mark.
The <hr/> tag is designed for just those cases. Unlike HTML, like font face or color changes or unusual formatting, this tag only draws a hairline across the page at the place where it's located. It has no global impact anywhere else. I suggest it be considered acceptable.
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