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In which I am unprofessional, as usual

I may not have mentioned that I am a technical editor for Julie’s book.

My biggest problem so far is my tendency to treat it like an extended blog post (or usenet posting) and insert smartass remarks, which aren’t really relevant to either my task or hers. For example, I inserted, then removed, a note about Blogger’s ability to “convert line breaks” in postings, using a double <br /><br /> tag:

…which is so far from the intent of HTML as a markup language that browsers should reject it as invalid code. But they don’t, so we will tolerate it until the Revolution comes.

This helps no one.

Now Playing: Come And Find Me from Golden Age of Radio by Josh Ritter

Posted by pjm on July 17, 2005 9:24 PM |

Comments

Oh, I don’t know, it gets some frustration out of your system, so it at least helps you. :-)

Just think about me, working in 2005 with people who still create HTML like that manually (well, without the closing slash that would mark them as XHTML-literate….)

I once had a heated conversation on the floor of Macworld Expo with the author of PageMill, the show when it was introduced by Ceneca and not yet bought, upgraded, and abandoned by Adobe. Must have been around 1997 or so, I guess. I argued strenuously that it should produce valid HTML, that the use of br br was a horrible idea and just made the web less and less useful. He didn’t see it that way.

The Revolution can’t get here quickly enough, sez I.

Posted by: ralph | July 18, 2005 1:19 AM

I have a comment to add, but it won’t let me…this is all I could get through your commenting system. Something about a “precondition” and what not.

Posted by: JM | July 18, 2005 11:13 AM

Ok, here goes:

Did you know there’s a rule that the author has to respond in some manner to all comments that the editors make? Just FYI… Mostly I just say “uh huh, noted” and move on.

But one part of your comment would actually have been good to put in, which would be to remind me to add a note to the reader that the slash-before-end-bracket in some tags is correct in XHTML and not to freak out when they see it, if they’re seeing it for the first time but are familiar with HTML and therefore thing it’s “wrong.”

It’s also ok to consider these the topics (or whatever Sams calls them) like a blog entry, because they’re more like that than they are sections or other elements of a typical book. People are supposed to be able to go to each topic as one-off elements, even though part of the book is sort of linear in design.

Posted by: JM | July 18, 2005 11:40 AM

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