Thread: The 2014 Annual Reading Challenge Discussion Thread!
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Old 01-22-2014, 05:52 PM   #240
Rev. Bob
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Katsunami View Post
I never understood that. Why not use 100% for normal text, 120% or so for chapters, and 90% or 80% for non-running text such as the copyright pages? (And even there, it's not necessary.)

Some years ago, it also was very "stylish" to have websites with tiny text. Think fonts at 8 or even 7pt. Try to read that, on a 22 inch 1920x1080 screen. (Not to mention Full HD notebook screens...)
I'm a webmaster by trade, and a minimalist by nature. I'm a firm believer in putting the controls in the hands of the users, so they can set their browser preferences once and never have to worry about it again. In my opinion, a book's standard code - aside from the stylesheet - should rarely be more complicated than headers, paragraphs, line breaks, bold, italics, and the occasional section divider. Sure, sometimes you do need more, like blockquotes or a way to represent things like text messages, but when I edited an ezine, it was really rare for my writers to need more than that.

Unfortunately, a lot of ebooks these days are styled to within an inch of their lives. I've seen some where the stylesheet is over 120K, and on top of that the span elements are nested three and four layers deep. Instead of setting the usual font at the body level, they define it as a class on every paragraph - and worse, sometimes they define one font there, only to immediately change it with a span element that encompasses the whole paragraph's text! Then there are the margins specified in inches...

Oh, I understand how it happens; lack of care in setting up a word processor template, combined with sloppy manual styling and then exported to HTML, will give shoddy results every time. I just think the publisher should take more pride in the finished product...or at least hire a polisher who takes pride in his work.
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