Well, firstly I don't need to place words in fermienrico's mouth, since the comment to which I was replying says: ‘"Sementic" structure is how we got responsive

Well, firstly I don't need to place words in fermienrico's mouth, since the comment to which I was replying says: ‘"Sementic" structure is how we got responsive web soup of ugly websites with hamburger menus’. On my part I'm trying to figure out why fermienrico considers that connection to be inevitable, in the context of HTML production, as compared to PDF production—i.e. with my correspondent taking the place of an author. Next: > I don't think that's a problem in HTML. I think the problem is in your head. This directly addresses fermienrico's complaint as being targeted at HTML. The ‘in your head’ part says that the problem is imaginary and that the person's reasoning and motivation in arriving at that connection is a mystery to me. So there are two meanings combined, both of which aren't ad hominems. The statement also deliberately invokes the words of the character of Preobrazhensky from Bulgakov's ‘Heart of a Dog’, on the condition of the fresh-born Soviet Union: “The Disruption isn't in the lavatories, it's in the heads”. Let's inspect the statement more closely. The use of the second-person ‘you’ in hypothetical constructs is ubiquitous in English, instead of a third-person ‘a man’ or ‘one’, e.g.: “When you try reading PDF on a phone, you experience unspeakable horror and loss of all hope”—this doesn't imply that the addressed correspondent is the one doing this, and in fact may be directed at multiple unknown readers or listeners. The hyperbole of ‘you're nuts’ is, to my knowledge, also a typical feature of colloquial English language, e.g.: “You must be crazy to try reading PDF on a phone”, or “What's wrong with you, that tablet is too small to display PDF adequately”. These both don't mean that the correspondent is literally mentally damaged, but that the speaking party doesn't understand their reasoning or doesn't agree with it. My choice of words there is rather harsh, yes. Why I needed that is, I've had this same discussion before and I repeatedly failed to extract from people the reasons why they make this inference. I tried different approaches, and now came the time of directly placing the person in the shoes of an author. Still nothing so far. On top of all this and nitpicking further, even disregarding the above I still can't quite fit the statement in a ‘personal attack’ category: as I understand it, an ‘ad hominem’ works by carrying a belief ‘the person has some bad quality A’ over to ‘the person's opinion B hence must be wrong’. In the case of ‘you must be insane/naive to have the opinion B’ no other personal qualities are involved, and the opinion B is directly stated to be wrong. Possibly uncivil and possibly unsupported yes, personal no. P.S. Could someone please make the ‘collapse comments’ button-link larger on phones? It's even worse on a higher-PPI display, easily taking a dozen attempts to hit it—and extensions like Stylus aren't readily available on phones, what with Firefox dumping them in Preview. Just making the link a dozen characters wide would be splendid.