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Designing this website has forced me to learn all about a strange and mysterious language called HTML.  It is the lingo in which this and most websites are written.  Did you ever get a e-mail that was full of odd markings in brackets like <BR> and <p align="center">?  Well, those are HTML codes and often, someone writes an e-mail message in that language but your e-mail reader will for some reason read it as a straight text message.  That causes you to see all them codes that are supposed to just format your message and then get out of the way.

I have recently made a number of unseen changes in this website to make it as close to 100% HTML proper as humanly possible.  This means encoding ampersands not as ampersands but by typing this: &amp;

Inserted into the HTML code of a website, that should cause your browser to see an ampersand.  This strikes me as an enormous waste of bandwidth.  We are now sending you five characters' worth of data — one of which is an ampersand — instead of just sending you an ampersand.  Leave it to computer scientists to figure out a way to make an abbreviation take longer to write.

In theory, this is supposed to make the text more widely compatible.  In truth, different browsers see things different ways and no matter how I write my code, there's always someone who e-mails and says, "I'm using Schlocko Browser version 7.1a and all your apostrophes look like pieces of rigatoni."  I have finally decided that if you ain't using the latest versions of Internet Explorer or Netscape, I don't care about you…and maybe not even then.