Quote:
Originally Posted by Nate the great
Since bowerbird is going off in his own little world, I decided to create my own autoformatter for PG ebooks. My planned output format is very basic html. It's the closest to a universal format right now. I think I will be able to implement most of the suggestions in the first post of this thread.
One problem with xhtml as an exchange format is lack of backward compatibility. (I also don't know what the tags are, so if you could point me at a tutorial I would appreciate it.) On another point, does any device use epub yet?
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Not a tutorial, but a very nicely organized reference:
http://xhtml.com/en/xhtml/reference/
I agree with DaleDe that the use of XHTML makes the most sense. For those who don't know how it differs from HTML, the reference I mentioned above will tell you exactly what is supported. XHTML is not some strange new beast. It is simply a more formalized version of the HTML that we all know. Some of the bad habits of HTML have been eliminated, some tags deprecated and a consistent structure is required. There is XHTML 1.0 Transitional, XHTML 1.0 Frameset, XHTML 1.0 Strict and XHTML 1.1. The latest 1.1 version is essentially 1.0 Strict and continues the process of clearing out some of the crud from HTML. There is a good reason that the IDPF folks specified XHTML 1.1 for use in epub.
Oh, and there is no reason that XHTML can't be backwards compatible, since it is really just HTML that has been cleaned up a bit. Even on such non-closed HTML tags like <br>, in XHTML you can use either <br/> or <br />. The second version should work correctly in older browsers.
The only major issue with XHTML is the use of <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> at the start of each document. This is the proper declaration to use, but Internet Explorer in particular has a problem with this and goes into "quirks" mode. If you need IE compatibility, you can leave this line out. For other purposes (especially epub), you should have it.