Ebook Formatting Errors?

[Ethan Holmes]

Does anyone know what the following gobbledygook means. It is the only message I received upon running my novel through Smashwords' recommended epub check. Suddenly after a year of sales Apple says my book is not good enough in its current epub format. Huh?

This is what I received:
ERROR: earths-blood.epub/tmp_af7e6e36650d4b06688430391833559a_cJg63I.ch.fix ed.fc.tidied.stylehacked.xfixed_split_000.html(18) : attribute "clear" not allowed here; expected attribute "class", "id", "style" or "title"

Thanks for any aid. EH

[Jellby]

In one in of the HTML files that form the ePUB, you have some element with a "clear" attribute, which is not allowed by the specs. You probably have something like:

<div clear="both">

and it should have been:

<div style="clear: both">

or similar.

[lindsayw]

I have had a similar error report for one of my books, comprising separate xhtml chapter files, all identical in xhtml structure, but only one chapter file from one book throws the error. I have examined it until my eyes are popping out, but there are no instances of attribute "clear" being used anywhere, either in a <br /> tag (old html allowed that) nor in any <div> or <span> tags. The error message specifies 5 different lines in my one errant chapter file (all identical to similar lines in hundreds of other chapter files), and I am suspicious because all lines include a <br /> tag, and I have read somewhere that a <!DOCTYPE... declaration can sometimes cause this error because of the DTD part of the declaration. It can sometimes assume that "clear" is a default attribute for some tag (probably the <div> tag). But all my <!DOCTYPE... declarations are also identical. It's a puzzler! It seems to be assuming that any <br /> tag includes a "clear" attribute, when none of them do.

[marytg]

Lindsay,
When I get an error that I can't find, I open the xhtml file with Google Chrome. It will stop on the line with the error and display which line it is on. It also reports the column but I don't find that to be useful; it's misleading in most cases.

I recognize your code as being created by Smashwords. You might find this post on my site to be interesting. Why Doesn't Smashwords Accept EPUB Files?

[lindsayw]

Hi marytg,
No, I'm an old fogey from the cobweb-ridden past, so I wrote all my stuff in Word, but did not use Smashwords or any other conversion system. I cut-&-pasted into an html editor then hand-coded the html because I have been doing that for decades... thought I could do it easily. Wrong! Xhtml came along at just the wrong time for me, so I had to upgrade all my old-fashioned html into xhtml and therein lay all my problems. I made mistakes (Gasp! Horror!).
It's red-face time on the reported error, too... after posting that the <!DOCTYPE... statement could cause that error I checked my own code for that particular chapter, finding it perfect. BUT... the version of that file inside the ePub was still an older version with a slightly different <!DOCTYPE> declaration so I can now report that this was definitely the cause of the error message. So all 9 of my novels are now error-free and I can get back to writing #10... you can be sure that the xhtml conversion process for that one will be undertaken with a lot more care!

[dwig]

Originally Posted by lindsayw

... It's a puzzler! It seems to be assuming that any <br /> tag includes a "clear" attribute, when none of them do.

Have you check all of the Styles, both in the HTML document and in any and all of the CSS files? The "clear" attrib could be there.

[lindsayw]

Have you check all of the Styles, both in the HTML document and in any and all of the CSS files?

Yes, I have a hand-coded style.css file and the error was definitely not there! I am fussy about style. The error was found elsewhere (see previous post).