oooooh, I didn't know a sequel was planned, last I saw from Sarah Monette she wasn't planning to return to the world, so you have made my day, thank you! I am totally down with it focusing on Mer Celehar, I really liked him as a character.

Hard-coding HTML is, I think, about control as much as anything else. You have absolute instrumentality without having to deal with the arbitrary hard-wiring of an XML. I tend to switch to the HTML window in any blog software by default.