NOTE: I moved these from another thread because I made a mistake and took the thread off topic.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter Sorotokin
I do not think XDXF would work well because it is a single file. Russian-English dictionary is 100 meg XML file: loading that in handheld memory would be challenging. So, at a minimum, single XML needs to be broken into pieces. Also, it is not an issue how to represent the content: it can be done either by CSS-styled XDXF snippets or CSS-styled XHTML with classes. This part is OK, no changes to the standard are required. The issue is how to build an index that can quickly guide reading system to the appropriate part of the content. Note that a single index file won't cut it - it will likely be too large. Some sort of hierarchical structure broken between several files is needed. That, I think, is an extension to EPUB that needs to be defined (or borrowed).
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I see the index as a feature of the reader software, not the Epub format. That's how Mobipocket Reader does it. When you look at the index of a dictionary in MobiReader, what you see on the screen was generated on the fly by the software. You're not looking at the contents of a file.
The Kindle does create index files, true. But it indexes all the ebooks on the device, not just the ones with Mobipocket's reference tags. This is a software feature that can be implemented now, without using these tags.
Besides, I thought the purpose of these tags was to remove the need for a separate index file.