Quote:
Originally Posted by murg
It isn't the EPUB format itself that's the problem, it's how people use it.
In theory, the HTML is for content, CSS for formatting. What's happening is that the line between content and formatting is getting blurred.
To my mind, content is the bits of a ebook that the author has specifically delineated. This means that you have your chapters and paragraphs. But also italics and bold, scene breaks, block quotes, etc.
Formatting is things like the indentation and spacing of paragraphs, chapter headings, whether A.M. and P.M. are presented in small text, how much space scene break consumes.
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That is a strange view in my opinion. Why are html-tags okay, but not css classes? How do you know something is a scene-break without a class indicating it? You can't say html is content and css is formating. It depends on how someone uses it. The best use of css does both: It specifies what a paragraph is (a scene-break, a letter, etc) and then defines how that content should be formatted. The formating is only needed, so that someone reading the book can see that the text has another semantic layer. Italics for example are used for several purposes, like inner dialog, the literal word, a passage in the past etc. What it is in a text can only be understood in the concrete context. With CSS, you could give each use a different class. Not necessary needed, but I just wanted to make clear with this example, that formating often has a semantic meaning and css is a way to define this.