[Hitch]

Originally Posted by ibu

@William Ockham
I appreciate such a direct criticism, that's first.

Which rational motives do you see for the jailers to use stoneage rendering machines on their devices?
Why do they like it, when it's complicate (instead of easy) to create rich layouts for books with the full possibilities of modern HTML and CSS?

We read answers in this thread of a professionell who suffers because of the lack of standardconformity of the several devices. Which advantages do the producers of devices have by that suffering?

You know, I gotta say...

This feels a lot like the golden-olden days, when we all thought that XML-->XSLT was going to rule the world, and we'd use the same nice pseudo-markup language XML coding for elements, and then the happy-happy joy-joy XSLT stylesheets would almost magically convert the XML into a device-specific book...and gosh, wouldn't that have been nice, if it had EVER happened?

But...for whatever reason, it simply never did. It just didn't catch on. Now, you can posit a boatload of reasons as to why, for the masses, it didn't, but I suspect a variety of things happened, in a given sequence, that sort of doomed that idea. (I'm not trying to be date-sequence correct in my regurgitation of what came when, in what follows): Firstly, you had early e-readers, in a very disorganized and über-geeky bunch of devices; then you had the emergence of both Smashwords and pre-Amazon MOBI (for Palm, if memory serves), the latter two of which were, essentially, both HTML-based. Or, more accurately, Word-based. I think that this is likely where the trolley left the tracks; add to that Microsoft's early aborted attempts with .LIT (and let's not forget Sony and LRF)...

And then, at some point (and, yes, I've leapt forward in time), TPTB (The Powers that Be) came to realize that self-publishing wasn't a fad. It wasn't like Pet Rocks, or Troll Dolls, and it wasn't going away. And, more importantly,the vast (VAST!) majority of authors--those self-same self-publishers--were never, never, never...NEVER...gonna figure out XML-->XSLT. Or, for that matter, ePUB. And LIT and LRF and some others simply died on the vine. Amazon acquired MOBIPOCKET, relatively early on, all things considered, and mobipocket facilitated, built on, and fed the idea that, hey! You, too, can be an ebook-formatter with a little GUI program and a Word file.

Meanwhile, Kovid had developed the early Calibre...which became Smashword's "meatgrinder" via the API...and more Word files became ebooks.

Then Amazon made it possible for self-publishers to upload a Word file (which was born by the advent of MBPC actually being the KDP-upload engine, in fact)...and I think that was the end of any hope that eBooks would ever be as "elegant" behind the scenes as they may be upfront, if they are, upfront. The idea of ebooks being the domain and dominion of "coders" or people who at least understood HTML/XML/CSS was just doomed.

I don't say that to disparage DIY'ers, I don't. But let's face it, if we'd had, stuck with, etc., something like XML-->XSLT, yes, indeedy, the backend would be "cleaner," I suppose, but this might all simply be one tired bookmaker's stream-of-consciousness rambling at the latter part of what has been one hellaciously long week. It's possible that the XSLT sheets, for any given book, could be just as "wrong" as the OP, ibu, thinks that the current CSS and its kindred HTML is now. I mean...it's not really any different. It's just a different way of getting to the same place.

In fact, in some ways, it's not dissimilar to what we now do, for Amazon, with media-queries; we transform our HTML into two different books, one for old mobi, one for new K8 mobi, using different CSS, processed with what is effectively an "if/then" sort of statement, based on the device to which the user has chosen to download it.

So...in reality, books are SAUSAGE. They're not, when all the dinner is served, a filet mignon. You can always recognize a filet mignon; it's always the same cut of meat. It's not a different cut of meat.

An ebook, however, is a sausage. It can be made of innumerable different parts; a standard paragraph may have innumerable different names in 100 different bookmakers' individual stylesheets; and of those 100 different bookmakers, each of them may have a different way of achieving the same visual result--for example, one of my Crew Chiefs prefers to use a bottom-margin for a given paragraph style; the other prefers to create visual separation with a top-margin. If I look at the ePUBs in my Nook or iBooks app, can I tell which is which? NO, I can't.

Can I tell you if one used ems, and the other percentages (for those keeping track, we're now up to 4 variations). NO, I can't.

On the Kindle devices, one bookmaker likes to use percentages (100%, 200%) and the other likes ems; a third likes to use Kindle's own naming conventions (small, large, x-large, etc.). Can you, looking at the book on a K2 or a Fire, tell the difference? NO, you cannot.

So...it's simply not that black-and-white. Yes, there's truly "wrong" html, and truly "wrong" CSS...but generally speaking, most of what you see in ebooks isn't either. A bookmaker may be less skilled than another; or perhaps more skilled, in a way you don't recognize, because he knows that if he does X, it won't work in Nook or Kindle or some reading application on an iPad.

Asking why ebook retailers don't all have one set of standards, and make the lives of bookmakers and producers easier is like asking why the elephant doesn't stay in the water less time to make it easier for his fleas. Quite simply, because the elephant doesn't have to. Whatever the elephant does, the fleas will just go along, because they have to.

Sure, they can jump off...but then they have to find someone else to latch a ride on, and a way to eat. Right now, that elephant is Amazon, and they didn't choose to go the way of ePUB. (For that matter, none of the alleged "epub-way" retailers, did, either; neither Nook nor Kobo nor Apple; all of their "standards" require ebook makers to twist ePUBs somehow, someway, to work on their "epub" reading devices, BTW). No bookmaker will survive, today, that doesn't make books that can go to Amazon, one way or the other. I don't think any commercial bookmaker can keep their head above water "only" making epubs.

And thus, because the elephant goes where it wants, and the flea just hitches a ride (sorry, couldn't resist), the flea doesn't get to have a say in the elephant's destination; it just eats what it can in its life as the elephant's passenger; and when the elephants decide to make the flea's life a little more miserable, the flea decides that this elephant is just as good as the next elephant, and adjusts.

Here endeth the lesson. I've been drivellicious on this topic long enough, I think. There is, quite frankly, no great answer to any of your questions, other than, this is just the way it is. And, really, the question I'd ask is, does knowing whether someone used an <em> instead of <i> in his story make you like his STORY any better? Really? I don't care if a great author hand-wrote his manuscript, typed it, word-processed it or dictated it into an old-fashioned reel-to-reel...nor do I really care about what's behind the curtain when I buy it. If it works on my device, and I can read it, that's it. It's a BOOK. If form follows function, and you can read it, that bookmaker, whomever s/he is, however it got there, did their job. Flea or no flea.

Hitch