It'd be nice if there were standard CSS classes that covered a good portion of books, such as:

• Chapter heading
• First paragraph in section (usually not indented)
• Indented paragraph
• Scene break

And so on. Devices could then allow you to define what these mean, e.g. “put spacing between paragraphs and don't indent anything”, or “no spacing between paragraphs, 1.3em indent for paragraphs”, etc. Books would also provide fallbacks for non-compliant devices.

A few problems, of course:

1. Getting anybody to agree on standards is really difficult
2. It certainly wouldn't cover all cases, and might make things look at bit odd when mixing and matching publisher/user CSS settings
3. Very few people care about things like this

Every time I have to fix the CSS in a book I wish that either it didn't bother me or that there were standards. Neither of which will be very easy to achieve...