Thread: What exactly are Standard Ebook's "advanced epubs"?
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Old 12-26-2020, 07:58 PM   #35
JSWolf
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Quote:
Originally Posted by acabal View Post
I'm sure you can craft an epub that would work on any particular reading system you choose; so can we, and that's not the point. The point is that we aren't targeting 8 year old ebook renderers, just like modern websites don't target Netscape Navigator or IE10. I'm sorry you don't like that, but that's the decision we have to make as a volunteer organization with limited time and resources.

We get to release one main ebook file--the compatible one--and it has to work reasonably well on as many modern--emphasis on modern--systems as possible. ADE 2.0.1 is not in that list because it's ancient, but systems like Kobo, Kindle, Play Books, iBooks, Bluefire, and so on, are.

It would be absurd to demand for a website released today to work on IE10, a web browser released in 2012, for it to be deemed "compatible". The same can be said for epubs, which are just websites-in-a-box that are rendered on what boils down to glorified web browsers. Any web developer who was working during the IE6 days will tell you how hard, and even impossible, it was to craft a single file that would work reasonably well across several browsers/renderers, let alone catering to demands from the peanut gallery to support obsolete pet favorites too.

Edit: I'll restate my invitation for you to volunteer on working on our build chain to build in the compatibility you desire. The source is on GitHub and anyone can create a pull request or discuss real technical solutions. But, note that we expect a professional standard of conduct.
Speaking of Bluefire, does McTeague by Frank Norris display correctly? Bluefire is built on a slightly newer version of RMSDK. I believe it's one RMSDK versions used in ADE 3.x.

Thing is, if you can code a website that looks like you want and does what you want but can be made compatible with more web browsers, why not do so especially if the code is no more complex then the way it was originally planned to be coded? It just makes more sense to have the most comparability possible. In the case of eBooks, the code is a lot simpler and it will now work on many more programs/Readers. You could take the version I posted, convert it to ePub 3 and still have it work with RMSDK. The most changes would have to be done in the OPF. But the CSS would not need to be changed. The HTML would not need to be changed all that much unless something needs fixing to be ePub 3 compatible.
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