[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Sarmat89

That's demagogy, as any system is expected to give better results than what we have now: a text field.

NO. Your imaginary and not-thought-through system will give you UNDEFINED "better results," because you are obsessed with metadata, and forcing everyone else to march to the beat of your drum, even though, as I've mentioned, and many others here have also mentioned a) 99.99% of all publishers AND readers don't give two hoots about metadata, and b) as we've also explained about 100x, your issue isn't with ePUB; it's with the DC definitions. As near as I (or anyone else) can tell, all you actually care about is having the metadata that YOU want available so you can use it to organize and quantify the books that you're reading.

Now you are getting inconsistent: first you tell about people who need special formatting and '400+ images', now you are telling about 'people uploading Word files'.

MWAHAHAHAHA. That's because, padawan learner, that's exactly what the bookmaking world is comprised of; books that can be uploaded as Word files, books that require adequate formatters and books that require very, very experienced formatters to create them. I, for one, don't believe that you actually make eBooks. Not commercially, not for others, and certainly not in any real volume. Your blithe dismissal of many of the things that have been said here is a clear beacon indicating a serious lack of experience.

It does not matter whether they are using converters or ask third parties to format books for them: in any case results achieved by a specialized format will give better results than a badly made EPUB and still better results with a proper EPUB.

So you declare, without any proof whatsoever. What we have here is the "Pie in the Sky" (acronym: PITS) format. An imaginary format, constructed entirely in your own mind, for which you have still failed to give any real meaning, structure, or anything else. You adamantly oppose DocBook, when you clearly have never used it, don't understand it, and don't realize that it's pretty much exactly what you've been alleging you want.

Why would they do that, again, when there is a convenient and understandable form to do that properly?

You mean, in your imaginary, unbuilt, unmapped format? Possibly because, like me, they don't have the information from their author or publisher? If you think that commercial bookmakers will go along with something that's this nuts--"oh, if you don't put in the name of the cover designer, you can't proceed," you are absolutely, 100%, positively WRONG. None of us is going to be willing to be stuck in some inflexible pipeline, because our clients--more than 99% of them--aren't going to give us all the metadata we ask for. Your imaginary plan is to have the bookmakers STUCK and on the hook, awaiting their clients, for your data. Let me think about that...uh, NO.

Originally Posted by Sarmat89

Exactly. The reader software is not required to use XSLT or HTML as intermediary formats. At the end it will be styled page elements.

MWAHAHAHAH. Oh, brother. You think that that will fly, with millions of readers who don't even know how to sideload a file to their device, much less style the book they've bought?

Originally Posted by Sarmat89

Another EPUB problem is that you need to have "experienced book creators" to work around the weirdness of EPUB format and device quirks. A good book format is cross-platform, and put the burden of displaying it on the reader, not the book author.

No, in fact, you are completely and irrevocably wrong. Millions--literally--of Amazon publishers have managed to create MOBI files by uploading a Word file. Mobi and ePUB share 98% identical "format DNA." Hundreds of thousands of ePUBs have been made by authors using Word files at B&N. I don't know how many, but certainly, hundreds of thousands--possibly a million--authors have made ePUBS out of their Word files at Smashwords.

Experienced book creators aren't needed to work around "the weirdness" of ePUB format and alleged "device quirks" (iBooks, anyone?). It has nothing to do with weirdness or quirks. Some books are simply vastly more complex than others. That's not "ePUB weirdness." Nor have you provided ANY freaking indication AT ALL why your proposed PITS would be better. Or how it would, even in your imagination, somehow be free of needing advanced bookmaking to deal with these same layout elements.

For sample, a sidebar, or pull-quote. The PITS that you've proposed is, for all intents and purposes (wait for it) DocBook. The XML uses an XSLT to transform it to--wait for it--ePUB. That's how that XML file is subsequently displayed on a device. How is it that you think that PITS would magically make the creation of a sidebar "easier?"

As near as I can tell, your idea is, when bookmaking, I'd simply call the main content <body> and the sidebar <sidebar>, and then if millions of readers didn't see it right, the onus is on THEM? I'm supposed to say, "well, tough s**t, kiddies, you have to tell your device how to display the sidebar, and you didn't, so nyah nyah nyah?" When they're telling their device how to display "all" sidebars, @Sarmat89, how do they know how small, or how large, sidebars have to be for different books? How do they know how large or how small the heading next to it is intended to be? By PFM? Magic? I've attached just a handful of images (guys: warning--these images are large-ish, set to 600w). as an exemplar. And these are a mere handful; not particularly complex, not spectacularly simple. A typical moderate-to-heavily-formatted ePUB. How would you possibly envision doing these with XML, leaving the rendering up to the individual reader? If you can pass an XSLT with the file--fine. But leaving it up to the individual reader is simply cracked. It reeks of inexperience.

The problem as I see it here is that you've gone as far as thinking that XML is some magic cure-all for what you perceive as "hard stuff" in ePUB, and your desire for more metadata. You have given precisely zero thought to how it actually implements. You've provided all of us with exactly zero real, concrete examples as to how your idea is "better;" you simply keep saying that it IS. You obviously didn't spend a lot of time on your school's debate team, either, or you'd know that simply reasserting your opinion, over and over, without any data or facts or ANYTHING else to back it up, is worthless.

Hitch