MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Great article on ebook formatting and web standards (A List Apart)

riemann42 · 03-10-2010, 01:14 AM

The comments to this article are quite insightful as well.

One major flaw in HTML for ebooks is the lack of book-like tags. Examine the styles on a major publishing house release of an ebook and you see what I mean. No one standard for body text, initial paragraph for chapter, pull quote, and most importantly footnotes / sidebars exist.

For conversion, I almost prefer PML (now that I have written my own pml to xml converter... almost as good as Calibre's... but it is in that sad old language, Perl). The stricter (sic) standard and fewer tags make producing ebooks that look and work similar to each other easier.

Now I would never advocate PML as a solution for anything, and am not ready to abandon HTML. I would love to see published standards for style names, tags, etc. for use with eBooks. Most importantly, I would love to see footnotes in ePub (either as an href, or preferably as a span tag).

By the way, speaking of footnotes, has anyone read the late David Foster Wallace's cruel joke on readers everywhere, Infinite Jest, as an eBook? I'm tempted just to see if my nook could handle the footnotes.

--Edward

03-10-2010, 01:14 AM	#7
riemann42 Zealot Posts: 121 Karma: 506 Join Date: Jun 2009 Location: Spokane, WA Device: eSlick,nook	The comments to this article are quite insightful as well. One major flaw in HTML for ebooks is the lack of book-like tags. Examine the styles on a major publishing house release of an ebook and you see what I mean. No one standard for body text, initial paragraph for chapter, pull quote, and most importantly footnotes / sidebars exist. For conversion, I almost prefer PML (now that I have written my own pml to xml converter... almost as good as Calibre's... but it is in that sad old language, Perl). The stricter (sic) standard and fewer tags make producing ebooks that look and work similar to each other easier. Now I would never advocate PML as a solution for anything, and am not ready to abandon HTML. I would love to see published standards for style names, tags, etc. for use with eBooks. Most importantly, I would love to see footnotes in ePub (either as an href, or preferably as a span tag). By the way, speaking of footnotes, has anyone read the late David Foster Wallace's cruel joke on readers everywhere, Infinite Jest, as an eBook? I'm tempted just to see if my nook could handle the footnotes. --Edward