Choose Your Own Adventure

[Philipp Lenssen]

"Erik Max Francis" <max at alcyone.com> wrote in message
news:3CD5A2DB.F9FBF976 at alcyone.com...
>
> You should get in touch with the interactive fiction community; try
> posting this announcement to rec.arts.int-fiction.
>

I regularly post QML news in that group. This one time however I thought the
Python community could take interest (since the news bit is about the Python
port, after all).

> The annotations on the screenshots do not layout properly on Netscape
> 4.x.
>

I'm sorry, but I didn't have time to optimize the page much for Netscape 4.
Instead I optimized it for the W3C standards XHTML1 Strict and CSS2. This
means the site works well for browsers conforming to the CSS standards, or
ignoring them, and its HTML is downward compatible. Good examples are
Netscape 6 (understanding CSS), and Netscape 3 (ignoring CSS). Due to the
seperation of form and content the site is also optimized for more exotical
browsers and/ or browsing situations -- such as different output media
(text-to-speech, print), or disabled images. Many websites use so-called
table-layout, something which is optimized for browsers like Netscape 4, but
breaks in many, many other situations. Another site I have is highly
optimized for Netscape 4, and it can become very time-consuming to also make
it look good in new browsers. I will test-check questml.com again in
Netscape 4, and if I find accessibility hurt, there's a simple trick to make
that browser completely ignore stylesheets.


> You should not use the phrase "Choose Your Own Adventure."  It is
> trademarked.

Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, or CYOA, is the common term used all around the
web and in newsgroups to title this type of game. Google returns about
14,900 matches to this phrase, and I suppose only some are referring to
anything trademarked. If it's a crime then this alone is no moral argument
in my favor, but a very pragmatic one -- if anybody's sued, then they will
have to take on a whole lot of people. The moral argument is simply that
this term is now in general use and became a common phrase, if it ever was
something different (which I'm not aware of), and that trademarks should
exceed on phrases very commonly used to designate not a single product, but
a whole category -- I don't know if this point-of-view is also expressed in
legal terms here in germany (where the web server is located).