Quote:
Originally Posted by Mister L
Did you do the experiment fully, comparing a book *with* semantic html to a book with just styled p tags? If you did, then you saw the dramatic difference between the two, and you should hopefully understand my point now. If you didn't and only looked at a book with styled p tags, then you only confirmed that that particular book was badly made. On the other hand if by "unreadable" you simply mean "not pretty in my opinion" then we are talking about two different things and I would disagree that "not aesthetically pleasing" is the same as "unreadable".
There are plenty of reasons to disactivate CSS if it doesn't work for your particular needs / preferences. I have personally disactivated the CSS (until I could fix the file properly) in books where the side-margins were defined in ems, for example, because they became too large and didn't leave enough room for the text. You might also want to disactivate the CSS if the person who made the book used low-contrast colours on the text and you are reading on a black-and-white device or are colour blind and cannot see those colours. Maybe the person who made the book chose unreadable (or just really ugly) fonts, or made the headings so much bigger than the body text that they won't fit on the screen, or put all the notes or captions in 0.6em size... those are all examples I've personally encountered in various commercial ebooks. Like I said, there are plenty of reasons and many that would never occur to me but are dealbreakers for someone else.
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If you deactivate the CSS you get the default for <p> which leaves large paragraph spaces. You get no indents. If the section breaks use something visual, it's no longer centered and is now on the left. If italics and bold are created using spans, you lose those too. Smallcaps are also gone. In most cases, offset text will no longer be offset. And there are other issues. So please stop saying the eBook is made wrong. It's not made wrong. It's some of the defaults when there is no CSS that makes the eBook unreadable. CSS is there to override some of the defaults so the eBook is readable. The problems you've seen that caused you to deactivate the CSS are very easy to fix. No need to deactivate the CSS until they can be fixed. They can be fixed very easily. Just use the Calibre editor or Sigil and you'll be fixed in not long at all.