Quote:
Originally Posted by bookman156
In my limited understanding, aren't semantic tags really an EPUB feature that just happens to get used by Kindle books more than they currently play any practical role in EPUB presentation?
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They play a big role when used with accessibility software for people who need it. That is the reason semantics were introduced in the first place. That is also why semantics have been greatly expanded in epub3.
The whole concept is that if a person has a vision impairment, their reader software can figure out both the intended structure and the intended meaning of the text from parsing and understanding the guide/nav landmarks, and with em and strong and specially chosen class names (and under epub3 using epub:type) more about the structure of the document and intended meaning for things that may be ambiguous when you can not see things like styling.
That is why they were first put in epub2 and why epub3 has expanded on their use. Just because most commercial software for people without vision impairment seem to ignore it (or worse yet in remove it!) is in no means an indicator of their value to people who use accessibility software.
I consider epub2 and epub3 more like official archive quality versions (so use as extensive a set of semantics as possible) that other companies who have proprietary formats seem to want as "input" and to mangle for really no good reason. Kindle's myriad formats (including kfx) offers them absolutely nothing you could not do with an epub, pdf, or fixed layout pub and in fact are more limited by removing support for scripting, multimedia (unless you are a commercial publisher on specific platforms only), accessibility, and semantics.
Sad really.
KevinH