Craig Morgan Teicher is the latest to complain that poetry has lousy “formatting” in E-books.
E-books do not contain “formatting.” As they are miniature Web sites, what they contain are structured markup and presentational instructions, i.e., HTML and CSS. One cannot “format” an E-book; this isn’t MS Word, and we are not dragging a cursor through a line of text and hitting a little box with a B in it.
Josh Tallent’s code sample is, predictably, invalid (you can’t run STYLE on top of elements in BODY), though that is merely an error of excerpting; the ePub file is valid. Now, this also isn’t the way I’d do it, but I can’t say it’s actually wrong. Nonetheless, Teicher recapitulates the tendency of delicate artistique types to freak out at the sight of any form of markup: He dismisses Tallent’s tiny sample as being “swamped in code.” (It uses P and some classnames. Clearly this guy has never seen real tag soup.)
Even somebody who wears a beret to the indie coffeeshop to scratch despondent musings in his Moleskine can be taught structural markup. Teicher’s attitude of “It’s Greek to me!” isn’t helping, is it?