Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
RobertDDL:
I respect your feelings. I was hoping, in my blithering, to make ePUB less painful for you
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Thank you!
I had honestly been resolved to remain silent here and not to contribute further to this distraction from the thread's original topic, but your kind words entice me to break this sensible resolution. I have criticised ePub unfairly, which does what it is meant to do well enough, and is also open and straight-forward enough to be edited at plain text level if one cares to put a little effort into understanding the details.
What I regret is the absence of an even simpler alternative, where the more advanced features of ePub aren't needed. In the early 1990s I've written an ebook reader software that ran under MS-DOS, which used a simple tagged text format. It had no problem at all with novel-sized texts, with bookmarks, with footnotes and internal links, and it automatically generated TOCs from heading tags in the text, allowing the reader to navigate the TOC by folding and unfolding heading levels -- all this instantly, without any noticeable delay. So, if I could do it more than 20 years ago, it certainly could be done today -- only, I lack the skills even to write a Firefox add-on that offers basic e-reading features for HTML -- like, bookmarks and folding/unfolding of heading levels --
this is what galls me, my own programming incompetence
(It would be much easier to do than, for instance, the Firefox ePub add-on, but, as often is the case with the simple things, no one bothers to do them.)
I'll start a related thread in a few days...