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Originally Posted by DiapDealer
I'm not following at all.
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For example, scene breaks.
I've rarely seen them have any actual visible content, which is necessary on an ereader, as the extra spacing can be lost at the top or bottom of a page. The physical book designers know this, which is why they generally use three asterisks to delineate scene breaks at the top or bottom of a page.
Other than as a CSS spacing from the previous or subsequent paragraph, I've rarely seen scene breaks being specially delineated. It's really bad when a blank paragraph is the representation of a scene break.
In my view, scene breaks are content. They usually symbolise either the passage of time, or a change in the point of view. They are something that the author has specially delineated in the source manuscript so that the designers at the publisher know what to do.
An additional aspect of this is that the simpler the HTML is, the easier it is to control the formatting of the ebook on a number of very different devices. That is one of the main purposes of CSS, separating the formatting from the content. What I'm seeing is that the balance of this equation has swung to the formatting side. This is mostly due to the poor quality of the editing tools, and probably has a lot to do with the fact that by the time the book is being formatted, the people doing the formatting are designers, who are primarily interested in the formatting and not the content.