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Originally Posted by avantman42
I suspect it's more to do with the fact that Word is the most popular word processor, and it's a lot easier for them if they just deal with a single format and a single program.
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More like the word processor that most of America has been strongarmed into using. But that's another topic for another time.
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I don't see why you should be troubled by it. I happen to agree that it's bad practice to use spaces or tabs for indentation.
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Its bad practice, until you try uploading to other sites. Both deviantart and goodreads.com try to strip indents out as often as possible; dA at least allows indents based on space characters, while goodreads strips out anything and everything that looks like indentation- spaces, indent characters, crafted HTML tags, tabs, everything. I expected better from goodreads, but then again I'm not the guy who wrote their parsers.
You also don't seem to have tried asking the community of either site for help in getting indents to work; the general concensus from both is that "grammar needs to catch up to the internet, and indents are so last-century." The whole topic of formatting a document to look professional is troll bait.
Not everyone knows about smashwords when they're first starting out, and what may "officially" be a bad habit on one site might be the only way someone can get something remotely passable on a majority of the others.