Treehouse hatchet job
There’s a new PDF magazine on the block. Treehouse, from the folks at Particletree, should help fill the void left by the demise of the PDF magazine from Design In Flight.
It’s a beautifully put-together magazine. The typography, illustrations and colour choices are top notch.
What a shame then, that they didn’t extend the same quality control to their editorial process.
I was asked to write an article for the inaugural issue. I wrote a piece entitled A Brief History Of JavaScript. There is an article by that name in the PDF but the resemblance ends there.
Just about every paragraph of my original article has been altered to reduce clarity and make the prose sound clumsy (even clumsier than it already was: no mean feat). Worse still, some of the rewrites play fast and loose with the facts. According to this article, I wrote:
"A standardized DOM had already been created by a recently formed organization calling themselves the W3C."
I can assure that the words "a recently formed organization calling themselves" were nowhere to be found in my original text.
Now, I have nothing against ruthless editing but this is bad, bad, bad. None of the changes were run past me so the first time I saw them was reading the finished magazine.
In attempt to clear this stain on my public record, I’ll be publishing the original, unsullied version of the article in nice pristine XHTML. I’ll probably post it over on the DOM Scripting website.
Sorry, Particletree. Treehouse gets top marks for style but please, either get a qualified editor or put down the hatchet.
Tuesday, October 4th, 2005 1:41am
Illustrations
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