I see it grows increasingly dangerous to allow literary types who are afraid of computers, and/or who use Windows, and/or who don’t know what markup is to discuss “formatting” of E-books. It seems a foregone conclusion that these people, raised on a Skinnerian diet of “MS Word” and its “italic” button, will never learn that “E-books” do not contain “formatting” and aren’t about to start.
Travis J. Nichols, who works for a poetry foundation with an ill-coded Web site (h4 cannot actually head a page and h3 doesn’t follow it), uses the bully pulpit of the Huffington Post to complain about “formatting” of poetry E-books. As such, he’s chosen just the right venue to air half-truths as though they amounted to something.
In a point Nichols glosses over, the actual problem is lousy semantic markup and equally lousy CSS. E-books are perfectly capable of displaying (not “formatting”) poetry. Why, just this week Dave Bonta exhaustively ran through the options, of which there is actually only one (again: semantic markup with CSS).
Nichols’s posting may give him some kind of status as a thought leader among followers who don’t think, but it hasn’t helped anything. He’s preaching to the ignorant, not the converted. Which of those is he?