this is all Philip's fault

serializing.html

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 <h2 id=divingin>Diving In</h2>
-<p>The concept of <dfn>serialization</dfn> is simple. You have a data structure in memory that you want to save, reuse, or send to someone else. How would you do that? Well, that depends on how you want to save it, how you want to reuse it, and to whom you want to send it. Many games allow you to save your progress when you quit the game and pick up where you left off when you relaunch the game. (Actually, many non-gaming applications do this as well.) In this case, a data structure that captures &#8220;your progress so far&#8221; needs to be stored on disk when you quit, then loaded from disk when you relaunch. The data is only meant to be used by the same program that created it, never sent over a network, and never read by anything other than the program that created it. Therefore, the interoperability issues are limited to ensuring that later versions of the program can read data written by earlier versions.
+<p class=f>On the surface, the concept of <dfn>serialization</dfn> is simple. You have a data structure in memory that you want to save, reuse, or send to someone else. How would you do that? Well, that depends on how you want to save it, how you want to reuse it, and to whom you want to send it. Many games allow you to save your progress when you quit the game and pick up where you left off when you relaunch the game. (Actually, many non-gaming applications do this as well.) In this case, a data structure that captures &#8220;your progress so far&#8221; needs to be stored on disk when you quit, then loaded from disk when you relaunch. The data is only meant to be used by the same program that created it, never sent over a network, and never read by anything other than the program that created it. Therefore, the interoperability issues are limited to ensuring that later versions of the program can read data written by earlier versions.
 
 <p>For cases like this, the <code>pickle</code> module is ideal. It&#8217;s part of the Python standard library, so it&#8217;s always available. It&#8217;s fast; the bulk of it is written in C, like the Python interpreter itself. It can store arbitrarily complex Python data structures.