Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
What we need (IMHO) are options in the reading software to specify indents/no indents, & paragraph spaces (how wide) or none. So if an eBook was made properly, the software could be set how it's wanted to look. That would be a major step forward. Also, we need no margins so we can set the margins as we want. No line height unless there is a need and we can set as we want as well. Basically, most of the formatting could be set a certain way unless there's a need otherwise and set as we want.
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IMO, to support that, we need:
1. A standard way to create a group of related rules that the reader must either use all of or none of, e.g. for positioning and font control of a drop cap, for specifying foreground and background colors of an inverted block of text, etc.
2. A simple way to specify lengths in more complex ways, e.g. setting margin-left to .25" or a certain percentage of the width, whichever is greater, without using JavaScript.
3. Agreement from the reader vendors on a standard way to specify default styles so that when we have specific paragraphs that actually need to have (for example) no indent, we can guarantee that the reader won't do something stupid when the reader turns on paragraph indentation.
4. Agreement from the reader vendors to not do stupid things like Amazon does, where they forcibly set a minimum line height of 1.2, making drop caps and other such things a pain in the backside.
5. Agreement from the reader vendors on one standard way to specify the default body font, and one standard way in which it will be overridden by every vendor, so that Nook won't use styles in a different way that breaks fonts on headings, iBooks won't use styles in a different way that ends up breaking styles in spans, etc.
6. Agreement from the reader vendors to not use the universal selector in their reader stylesheets. Ever.
And so on.