Quote:
Originally Posted by eping
Actually, I think ePub should give up XHTML,adopt a more simple markable language only for books, such as naming BML or so.
|
That's pretty much what they did, only it's called OPS (Open Publication Standard), not BML, for the content. OPS is
not XHTML+CSS. It is, for the most part, a subset of XHTML+CSS, with some eBook-specific additions. Put simply, if you code to the full set of XHTML+CSS you will not have an OPS compliant book. And if you code to the full set of OPS you will not have compliant XHTML+CSS.
e.g. "display: inline-block" is not valid in an OPS Style Sheet, but it is valid in CSS
e.g. "display: oeb-page-head" is valid in an OPS Style Sheet, but not in CSS
An EPUB is OPS content organized by in an OPF structure and encapsulated in an OCF container.
OPF - Open Package Format - basically describes how all the files need to be organized, and the metadata file (the .opf file) that needs to be included to define the contents.
OCF - Open Container Format - describes how all these separate files are to be combined into a single file for easy transport. It basically says use ZIP.
Back to the topic of this converstain, they could easily define another "display" type for footnote and it would solve our problem, except, just like "oeb-page-head" and "oeb-page-foot", it would likely go unimplemented. It seems (at least for now) that all the vendors are just using existing web rendering engines and they haven't (yet) done much to extend to OPS. Some even render illegal tags (like "display: inline-block"), that they clearly didn't implement from scratch - they got it from their existing kit.