Quote:
Originally Posted by llasram
So unfortunately EPUB / the OCF needs some sort of arbitrary limit on the size of markup streams. It's the simplest solution to the problem without ditching the entire OCF and creating a completely different container format from scratch. I'm hoping that such an explicit -- if yes, somewhat higher -- arbitrary limit will eventually become part of the specification itself.
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This is like line-length limits in the Fortran programming language. In the specification there are limits to the number of characters in each line and the number of "continuation lines" that can be used. There is, as far as I know, no real reason for these limitations other than it is not sensible to demand complying compilers to support unlimited number of characters per line. Each (or at least some) compiler must have a limit somewhere, and rather than having each compiler setting a limit by itself, it was preferable to put a limit in the specification, something that every compiler must support. Then it is up to each compiler to make it possible to use longer lines, but users should not expect this to work on every compiler.
Enough of off-topic. It's true that there should be a limit on what must be supported, there should be a minimum file size, number of styles, nesting level, etc. that
must be supported by ePUB readers.