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Originally Posted by Jellby
It allows you to show the structure with multi-level nesting, while many readers don't support (or don't display properly) many levels in the NCX. And this is useful for some fiction too: books may have volumes, parts, chapters, and additional material like maps, family trees.
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Yes, readers do multi-level TOCs very poorly. But doesn't this just perpetuate the problem? If e-books just work around the problem, there's no motivation for them to fix anything.
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It allows to have additional information in the TOC. It's not uncommon for printed books to have a short summary of each chapter in the TOC, you can't have it in the NCX. Some books are compilations of stories by different authors, you may want to show the author's name and original publication data (for instance) in the TOC.
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Now this I can see.
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It can be fancifully formatted, with different fonts, colors, alignments, even illustrations. None of this in the NCX.
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Not my cup of tea, but you're right, unsupported.
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Of course, many books don't need an inline TOC at all and can be left with the NCX, but some of them may benefit from an inline TOC for the above reasons. In that case, I add an entry in the NCX pointing to the inline TOC, for quick access, if desired.
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Agreed. To paraphrase my previous post, if it's doing something useful, keep it in. If it's not, and you're blindly adding an HTML TOC to every book, you're not doing your readers any favors.