Quote:
Originally Posted by Ghitulescu
This is not what I meant.
Otherwise, your world would have been made of a single object that does everything for you: cooks, makes coffee, play music, videos and books, help you with transportation, runs games onto, work the land (agriculture), catches the fish, hunts the bears, goes to Mars and back, and so on.
That several products exists, is a strong indication that diversity is needed. Also that a format that fits one particular object doesn't fit another as perfect as the first.
Taking an eReader for example, it can display statically a text or image, and re-paginates (reflow) a text made to flow. It doesn't require a backlit (like computers, tablets or smartphones do) but it's slow. So long lasting, no backlit, but slow. On the other hand, smartphones and smarttabs are small enough to have a good overview of a concept - scrolling and/or small prints are often required (zoom in - zoom out - drag -click) - both a nuisance for older people and/or aged view. Computers are fine for everything except that they are big (even laptops) and need energy (low mobility). Tablets may be the golden cut, but not they are free from disadvantages (cannot be read at the beach).
And finally, if a single format would be the goal, why there are photos different from text?
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An excellent analysis of why there is fragmentation in hardware, and that it is a good thing. I am still waiting for an explanation of why multiple formats of textual+images ebooks are needed, though.
Yes, images are a different format than text. This was a decision made AFTER the amazing discovery that text doesn't do images well.
I am waiting for an explanation of how the EPUB2 standard is lacking the features for displaying text ebooks on both e-ink and LCD hardwares.
Rendering speed is a quality of the device hardware, not part of the nature of the text/html mimetype and the ZIP compression standard.