Of all the things to be irked about...

This is where I post the most pathetic whinge about AO3 that has ever been whinged. I like to think I'm not that wanky about my creative stuff; I can let things go; the net is an imperfect publication system and that's OK (how many fics have I split up to post on LJ that weren't meant to be split into parts?). But apparently I can still be irrationally irritated by minor things...

Basically, what this boils down to is the way you align text to the right on the AO3 interface. (Yes. Text alignment. I know.) My last poem was aligned right - some might say unnecessarily, but it was still a conscious decision. To display that on LJ and DW I put the whole thing in a tag <div style="text-align:right"> - but the AO3 doesn't support in line styling, so the poster strips the tag down to just <div>, which does nothing to the alignment. I get around it by using <div align="right"> - but I try not to use depreciated HTML (except <font> in comments because it's just very easy... I am a bad HTMLer :( ), so I drop a line to Support, because it seems odd that this would be the most sensible way around the issue. As it turns out, it isn't, and the AO3-recommended way to do things like aligning sections of text etc. is to apply a CSS work skin (eg. the public basic formatting skin) and then use classes, ie. pull down on one extra option on the posting form's menu and then use the tag <div class="align-right">.

To be fair, this is very easy (although I feel like I should mention that this wouldn't make sense to someone who's trying to use the Rich Text editor, because that has an alignment button and it doesn't work). My issue with it is the way this Work Skins business has been implemented is so that creator's styles can be very easily be turned off, either by default or by a fairly obvious button at the top of the work. So now anyone on the work page can basically toggle my poem back and forth across their monitor. I suppose this is so, should there be a trend in formatting fics in eyes-bleedingly ugly ways they can be very easily turned back into plain text - but. While the rational, readerly part of me understands this is very sensible, the wanky poet part of my head won't stop ranting, "but the poem is aligned right!! It's not aligned 'right but with a button in case you want to read it left-aligned'!! The act of moving your eyes from the part of the page where you expect text to this other corner is a whole part of the reading process!! It's not there to be toggled at will!! It should just be!!".

And yet the rational part of me that is proud of her basic HTML skills refuses to change the tag back to something wrong just to get rid of the button, not least because it's the site standard and you should uphold people's expectations. So now I'm miffed - about something which isn't really a problem. Because I wrote too much poetry and became pretentious. :(

We shall not talk about the time I spent faffing with longhand spaces - ie. [ampersand]nbsp[semi-colon] - in my last poem so that everything was aligned correctly on the various different platforms I posted it, with their different fonts and sizes + posters which strip back multiple typed spaces. Concrete poetry doesn't half feel that way when you post it in HTML...