“IF IT WAS JUST ME AND A TAMBOURINE,
IT WOULD STILL BE THE FALL”
– Mark E. Smith

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?

The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2010.07.15 12:47. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is:
https://blog.fawny.org/2010/07/15/ebook-poetry/

(Values you enter are stored and may be published)

  

Information

This personal Weblog is unlikely to be updated again until my next book comes out. (See Best postings)

Topics of interest here

Archives by category

Archives by date

Just add /year/month/day/ to the end of site’s URL, blog.fawny.org. You can add just /year/month/, or just /year/, if you wish. Years are four-digit, month and day two-digit (with padding zero below 10). For example:

Copyright © 2004–2023

You enjoy fawny.blog

Transgenderism is to be opposed categorically