Caveat Lector

Want to know what’s scary? I will tell you what’s scary. It is bloody scary when a squib you once wrote as a low-level introduction to a few useful concepts gets blown all out of proportion into a Major Treatise on Markup.

Terje Hillesund tries to eviscerate me in his latest article Many Outputs. (Nod to FOSBlog.) I think my two articles get more explicit mentions than anything else in there. (Of course, that could be my ego talking, but I surely did see my name an awful lot.)

Shame Terje doesn’t read my blog. He’d know I’m basically on his side. Much of his article boils down to “typography doesn’t magically happen,” and “sometimes separating content from presentation is more bloody trouble than it’s worth,” and what else have I ever said?

I will have to do up a proper formal response to this, because while Terje is basically a right-minded guy, he’s got some stuff confused. (Plus, I really want to point out that my poor little articles were only ever meant to be broad-brush introductory material, not serious hard-hitting research.)

By the way, I’ve met Terje and am quite fond of him, so don’t think I’m running him down. I’m amused, not offended. Well, and saddened that the state of markup education is such that Terje can make such a mountain out of a pair of molehills.