The sometimes troublesome BookNet Canada issued a call for presentations for its annual Technology Forum. The deadline for submissions is six months in advance. Just the day before, an entire Toronto publishing house was shuttered by its corporate parent. Do you think anything might change in the publishing industry between now and then?

My submission was, in some ways, obvious:

Structured documents for managers and editors:
How to commission and evaluate E-books

• You’re a manager or editor who commissions work for E-books, for the Web, or for (iOS) applications
• You haven’t had to deal with developers (i.e., programmers), but you’re doing that now or are about to start
• You are having trouble getting your head around the technical aspects of E-books, or your imprint has E-books that don’t work

This session will equip you with basic concepts and vocabulary to commission and evaluate the structured documents required by E-books.

What you’ll learn

You can’t just ask for a “manuscript” delivered as an “MS Word file”; there are specific requirements nobody has told you about – until now. We’ll teach you about structure.

This isn’t about dramatic or three-act structure. It’s about how writers mark up and annotate their text so that machines can do things with it.

We’re going to teach you document structure or structured markup. We’re keeping things at a managerial level. We’ll teach you the basic concepts and the vocabulary to go with them. We’re also teaching ways to specify deliverables and evaluate whether those deliverables have been met.

You need basic knowledge of document structure if you hope to credibly manage E-book development. Nobody’s bothered to give you this training before. We will.

What are structured documents?

You’re swimming in them. Every Web page you browse (Flash excluded), every Web app you use, every E-book you read, and every app with a lot of text you tap through all use structured documents.

The easiest example is the Web, which cannot even function without structured documents. HTML, the language of the Web, is a form of document structure. Every E-book is a structured document. We’ll teach you enough to manage the writers and developers who supply content to you.

Why this is something you’ll want to learn

• Few managers, and no editors, in Canadian publishing understand document structure. Walk into a meeting with this kind of knowledge and you’re already one step ahead.
• You can bypass the funding agencies. Got an idea for a Web site, a Web app, an iPad app? Is there a lot of writing in it? Well, you don’t need to apply for grants from conventional funding agencies. You can just go out there and join forces with computer programmers and other developers. It will suddenly be possible to talk to those developers; you’ll speak enough of their language to do business.
• One skill, many venues. Once you learn the basics of managing structured documents, you can use those skills everywhere – often the very same skill with no modification.

What this isn’t about

We aren’t going to teach you how to write anything, let alone how to write structured documents. We’re giving you basic understanding, a vocabulary, and a set of tools.

Skills you’ll learn

• A new sense of the word “semantics”
• Separating content from presentation
• Recognizing structural elements in existing documents
• Standards you can require vendors to meet
• Verifying that vendors really have met those standards

The standard we’ll teach you is HTML – real, valid, correct HTML you can use anywhere, including in electronic books.

Chris the Fireman.

A leitmotif, a lodestone, a distillation of Frenchness: Angie, by – inevitably – Jean-François Porchez.

Have you seen my calling card? Perhaps, if you are especial, the red one?

I’ve covered this topic before: Joe Jervis is the grizzled writer of the unaccountably popular homosexualist Weblog Joe·My·God. You know our diverse gay communities are in a sorry state when this guy’s blog passes for a news source.

A few sharp edges have been filed off, but at a technical level it remains the worst blog in the world that isn’t intentionally created to cheat and harm you. This is a blog that can and will crash your browser.

Now, what else will it do? Serve as a honeypot for threats of violence against public figures. Jervis has admitted this before and does so again:

[P]lease E-mail me if you see comments calling for the physical harm of public figures. Anti-gay asshats have been trying to leave such comments here so that the media will see them and report that “the gays are just as bad!” As always, be advised that… comments have been harvested and published elsewhere in the past.

Here again we see not just the downside of comments but the harm they cause. Joe Jervis writes a blog that attracts comments calling for violence. Comments like those, but in fact all comments there, can and will be used by his opponents, who in the normal course of events will also be the opponents of the writers of the comments.

Again: Why does your site have comments?

Why does Joe·My·God have comments?

Why is Joe Jervis such a menace to society?

UPDATE (2010.09.30): And again he reiterates the threats and liabilities of his site as though they were strengths. “[F]eel free to run your filthy fucking mouths, shout down the asshats, and say whatever needs to be said. But you may absolutely not make threats of physical harm, however idle.”

Which is actually more dangerous to the general public: What’s in Joe Jervis’s bloodstream or what’s on his blog?

Amerikanski Psycho, ≈18:30 (and now with 2021 update):

— Is that a gram?

— New card. What do you think?

— Whoa. Very nice.

— Look at that.

— Picked them up from the printer’s yesterday.

— Good colouring.

— That’s bone. And the lettering is something called Silian Rail.

— That’s very cool, Bateman. But that’s nothing. Look at this.

— That is really nice.

— Eggshell with Romalian type. What do you think?

— Nice.

— Jesus. That is really super. How’d a nitwit like you get so tasteful?

— I can’t believe that Bryce prefers Van Patten’s card to mine.

— But wait. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

— Raised lettering, pale nimbus. White.

— Impressive. Very nice.

— Mm.

— Let’s see Paul Allen’s card.

— Look at that subtle off-white colouring. The tasteful thickness of it. Oh, my God – it even has a watermark.

— Something wrong? Patrick? You’re sweating.

That last man is the quavering, foppish, bow-tied quisling of the picture, so of course his card would offer the gaucherie of colour.

Doesn’t a card like that scream “Watch your back in the washroom”?

Update

(2021.07.11) From a YouTube parody by Bup (no relation):

• 

  That’s Georgia and those are fake small caps. But the errant missing space after the ampersand is preserved.

• 

  Offset-printed, this Bodoni is much too brilliantly clear. The sizes are wrong. But the restored space after the ampersand is rendered.

• 

  The original wasn’t really trying (no one in that echelon would have dared use a sansserif, let alone Helvetica; small caps are, as ever, fake), but this Arial monstrosity is an insult to the intelligence.

• 

  Bup (still no relation) even managed to include this design in the reveal of the card. Overall most authentic typography – readily contrasted against the dog’s-breakfast layout and ideologies.

Here is an artist’s rendering of the proposed renovation of Women’s College Hospital, Toronto.

Which important feature has been completely bungled? Typography, of course. (Public typography in Toronto is a topic I gave myself a year to investigate – four years ago – and didn’t.)

In this drawing, architects, who insist they know everything about everything, very much including type and the written word, have banged out WOMEN'S COLLEGE HOSPITAL in Arial. With a neutral quotation mark. Splattered across the street-level windows, no less. I expect this sort of thing from a discount store (“GOING OUT FOR BUSINESS”), not a legitimate public institution.

There’s all sorts of time to fix this. Think it’ll actually get fixed?

James Lord, My Queer War, p. 333:

“Too bad. And we have nothing to remember him by. Christ, he was that handsome! Do you realize there’s no extant photograph of him?”

“Yes. I know that. I know it. But I don’t know why.”

“He had something to hide, Hanno had. Maybe it was only himself hiding from himself. We’ll never know. Even his parents. The only photo they have was taken when he was 11.”

“Why is that?” I asked. “Why is it like this?”

“It’s because we’re queer, my dear.”

With 130 hours clocked in on the ultimately godforsaken task of watching captioned and audio-described movies, last night I was superexecutively Yarissed out to Mississauga, home to the sole cinema still running Scott Pilgrim vs. the World with MoPix.

I loved it! Especially the movie. As soon as the lights went up, though, it became obvious my esteemed colleagues were baffled and overwhelmed by the experience. That happens like clockwork – the whole thing is a bit too much stimulation for the neophyte. (And everyone’s a critic.) As with captioning, where you have to sit there watching TV for two weeks straight just to develop the neurological ability to assimilate all that information at once, your first experience of cinema audio description will probably be your worst. It’s certainly happened with other writers I’ve brought to MoPix movies.

I don’t know of any writer who’s tried it more than once, so first experiences become last experiences, which makes grand pronouncements tempting. Journos can’t help noticing the established conventions of audio description. (They’re word people, and description is fundamentally literary.) The pitfall to avoid is going gotcha! and acting like you spotted a mistake. It probably wasn’t a mistake; we aren’t debugging software and you haven’t isolated a regression. It’s just that the whole thing is new.

We can’t rewind the movie to explain why things are done that way, or why something might be an outright mistake, a judgement call you happen to disagree with, or a practice that dearly needs to be tested. Yet almost all respondents in the only credible survey of audio-description users claim they get just the right amount of information. (That means we are arguing over edge cases.)

I speak for a lot of us when I say we have a great deal of battle fatigue after fighting a ground war for decades just to make things like movies basically accessible to blind or deaf people. Generally they aren’t. On the rare occasion it actually happens, people think the job is done. But can’t we improve anything? What needs to be improved? Why can’t we study that? After years of frustration, there’s only so much explaining I can manage. It is too much for me to be advocate, critic (everyone is), and ambassador all at once.

In whatever story comes out of this, I would anticipate a tone of general bafflement and worldly dismissal, the latter of which, at least, is also a pitfall to avoid. Still, if the resulting DVD contains the description track, which rare Universal Studios discs do, one could have a very special kind of viewing party. Send the same people.