Fairly poor editorial practices...

Okay, that's just stupid. I am a regular reader and do-er of Web Designer Magazine's tutorials.

This month's big cover story was about HTML 5, and all of the coming niftyness that accompanies it. The way you active HTML5 is to specify a certain DOCTYPE at the top of the document, and every professional developer knows to specify a given DOCTYPE. This ensures that the HTML interpreter will "do the right thing" and for the past two years or so it's been okay.

I was working my way through the first tutorial in the magazine, "Build a side-scrolling web page with jQuery navigation!" Since I was doing the exercise myself, I was wondering why my pages didn't come out the way the tutorial said they would.

I looked in the tutorial folder. First, they didn't specify a DOCTYPE. I had (being, you know, a professional and all.) So when I ripped out the DOCTYPE, the tutorial started working.

Second, despite this being about "Side Scrolling," the tutorial is entitled "Vertical Scrolling" on the CD-ROM.

Too harsh?

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?