".mobi/.prc is also basically a HTML container with support for metadata and DRM. Unfortunately it's even worse that .lit since it defines a proprietary extension to HTML."
I kind of like that actually in some senses (though I don't like that the extensions are hacked onto otherwise standard HTML). but .. I mean, ... it's stuff that makes sense in a book. It makes sense that a book should contain varying image sizes for varying ebook readers, ... or that an ebook should have a tag to skip to the next page. I think I would have preferred if epub had started from scratch and written up DTD's for an independent XML format that wasn't trying to conform to the not-so-book-optimized xhtml standard.
Separating chapters seems to require multiple HTML files. A from-scratch design would probably have a chapter tag, so the whole book could fit in one XML file that had the text of the whole book and all the meta data. Things like the mobi-extensions wouldn't seem like out of place hacks. Tags for headers and footers at the book or chapter level could be smoothly integrated. A quick short simple xslt or other script could quickly and easily convert to HTML if needed, and so things like firefox plugins and converters wouldn't really be any more difficult to write... I think it would be easier to write conversion software actually, and that such a format would preserve more of the essentially book-like information.
I just read the wiki on mobipocket files. I think the "guidelines" listed for creating a mobipocket book make sense. It seems like by letting people just write HTML, book authors are encouraged to write books as if they were writing a web page... specifying fonts and font sizes, using messes of nested and fixed with tables, .. Who knows? maybe even wacky javascript code to try to swap for device-appropriate image sizes? A stricter format could force book-authors to create books in a more consistent, simple, sensible way.
I haven't looked at how much of the xhtml spec is actually supported though. .. dale did say "a subset" ... and ... that does make me feel a lot better about it.
and... I probably will go with the epub format. It's not like I see a better alternative. I'm just ... whining I guess.
Oh ,.... and I noticed a script to convert the result of convertLIT into an epub book. This looks cool, ... it was in this thread:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=11784
I'll probably use that with convertLIT to standardize on epub files. I guess... maybe you are right though about the suckyness of the mobi extensions-to-html, if they mean I can't do the same thing with mobi files. not that I was really saying I liked the idea of extensions to html either though...
... but, ... Why are there all these files (book designer install, and this conversion tool), that are only available as links in threads? Is there a way to store them in the wiki? It's hard to find files searching through threads, trying to find what page of the thread the file is on, ... and then trying to go through every page looking to see if there's been a updated version uploaded. Can we do something about that somehow?