Quote:
Originally Posted by Mister L
Most of those are aesthetic complaints, and as I said previously, I don't agree that an unattractive book is necessarily unreadable, it's just not as pleasant an experience. For some people it might be preferable (in particular cases where the CSS makes the book literally unreadable, such as in the case of low-contrast colours for colour-blind people). I personally am able and willing to edit the code to fix a book to my liking. Not everyone is, and they shouldn't have to. However the question of whether semantic code is more correct than unsemantic code is not a question of opinion; it simply is the case. As you say, italics and bold made using spans disappear if you disactivate the CSS; that's not the case if they are properly made with semantic tags, which has been more or less my point from the beginning.
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With no CSS, the formatting gets in the way of reading. It makes it more difficult to read. There are things I don't like and do fix. I've seen eBooks where I could read as is even though there are some things I would fix. Thing is, with no CSS, the eBook is awful and unreadable. You can lose a lot. Bold/italic, section breaks, paragraph spaces too large, no embedded font (if it's needed or looks good), chapter titles can look like body text, centers, offset text, different font types (sans-serif and/or monospace), tables can be a mess, graphics not correct on screen or sometimes run off the screen, and other issue. So please don't say that an eBook that doesn't look good without CSS is because it's incorrectly coded. It's not. It's because the CSS is not there.
If you feel so strongly that an eBook can be readable without CSS, please post an eBook without CSS that you think is formatted well enough to be readable.