Quote:
Originally Posted by DiapDealer
I don't see the non-breaking space issue as a tragedy, myself. I've always felt that ebook makers who use paragraphs with only non-breaking spaces (or a non-breaking space followed by a br tag) for vertical spacing were shooting themselves in the foot all along. This change just confirms that.
Besides, they're (Amazon) not the first to have renderers that ignored empty paragraphs (or paragraphs with only an nbsp). That's why the nbsp followed by a br tag convention came into play in the first place (and so long ago).
They never had a format that rendered identically across all their devices and apps anyway. Publishers, creators and selfpubbers will survive this change too. They always do. It's always involved a lot of work planning and implementing a coding strategy to achieve similar rendering on the widest possible range of devices and apps (and formats) without resorting to maintaining 14 different versions of your ebook. This doesn't really change that.
And if it forces people to start using css for vertical spacing (like they should have been doing all along), I'm all for it. Makes it exponentially easier for the person [Hi Hitch!] that's eventually going to get called in to fix it all, at some point down the road, anyway!  |
Hi, DD:
Just getting caught up with this thread, which thus far, has been pretty darned amusing. Yeah, verily, a long time ago and some galaxies away--in my MBPC days, in the aughts--I may have used the "empty para" trick--but if a bookmaker tries that with me now, they're not working for me any longer. For all the right AND wrong reasons, but mostly because, it's simply unreliable and it's bloody LAZY.
I'm looking forward to the enhanced capabilities. I'm dead tired of the idea that a Fiverr can do what we do (or the ubiquitous "upload your Word file and we'll automagically convert it to..."). It's annoying as s**t.
Hitch