Too harsh?

[elfs]

This is the note I left for the editorial team at Web Designer Mag:

Despite Issue 181 concentrating on HTML5, if you specify the HTML5 DOCTYPE in Tutorial #1, the tutorial doesn't work.

The tutorial is named "Side Scrolling" in the magazine, and "Vertical Scrolling" on the CD-ROM.

The command specified in the rails tutorial step 6 does not work. It is wrong in both the magazine and on the CD-ROM. The correct command is "rails generate controller home index". The word 'controller' is missing in the original.

The text files on the CD-ROM use ASCII-CR for linebreaks, rather than the more modern ASCII-LF. I had to copy the files off the disc and reformat them with Perl to make them readable.

As a loyal American reader of your magazine, I found the editorial failures in this issue disappointing.

I don't think the note comes off well. What do you think? Too harsh, too blunt? Or just right?

Comments

[elbowfetish.livejournal.com]

In what way is linefeed more modern than carriage return? Either is a bastard variant of the traditional use of both together, unless you're using EBCDIC.

Maybe you shouldn't say "American"

[ideaphile.livejournal.com]

It makes you sound like a Republican.

I find it's effective to end such a letter with "best regards". Really takes the edge off. :-)

. png

End of the Line.

[elbowfetish.livejournal.com]

1964 LF Multics (later Unix)
1981 CR+LF CP/M (later DOS)

Then there's Mac in 1984 with CR (exactly backwards, against ANSII sigh)

Re: End of the Line.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

And the current Macs (Darwin), which do LF half the time, CR half the time, and CR+LF when they're feeling perverse.

[tamino.livejournal.com]

I don't think the note is too harsh; I think the reason it sounds weird might be that you're trying to put up an outraged front while you're really just groaning and facepalming inside.

Everything up until the very last sentence sounds weary, somewhere between "You might find the following corrections useful" and "Do I really have to *tell* you this stuff?". And then at the end there's a little bit of contrived snippiness tacked on as an afterthought.

That's how it comes across to me at any rate.

Meh, can't get annoyed about end of line characters anymore...

[pakraticus.livejournal.com]

As 90% of the crap that gets deployed on Unix systems at work is written on Windows, the EOL sequence is nearly always wrong.
The fix for the trainable developers, start running from a source control system that actually handles outputting for native EOL.

Which brings us to the big WTF, it's 2011, why are they shipping CD-ROMs instead of shoving the tutorials into a source/version control system. The amount of blank stares I get at work when I mention "You should keep that in a source control system," is horrifying.

[lemur123.livejournal.com]

Yes - remove "Despite Issue 181 concentrating on HTML5" and "As a loyal American reader of your magazine, I found the editorial failures in this issue disappointing", and it will make the letter focus on a specific issue, rather than slagging their competence in general. People may respond more positively to a single, discrete criticism than to a critique pointing out their general incompetence.