Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
It is in a sense an issue with the "data format", Dale. If you jump to an arbitrary point in a Mobi file you have no way of knowing what current "state" you should be in - bold, italic, centred, left-justified, fully-justified, or anything else. That's why ePub loads the entire XML parse-tree into memory, so it has valid state data for every "node" in the tree and knows how to render it "correctly" if you jump arbitrarily to that node.
This "problem" with Mobi is precisely what allows it to work "well enough" on ANY device, no matter how limited its memory resources may be, since you're only ever dealing with a single "page" of the book at a time.
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Yea, and I suspect ePUB could be rendered without getting the context right either if you wanted to settle for that. It would be readable but not right. This is the same as MOBI and is an HTML by product, not unique to mobi. In ePUB the big complication is that you first have to read the CSS and set it up before rendering anything but, having done that, you are likely to be correct or almost correct even if you jump in the middle (depending on how the file is formatted of course which is why I say it needs guidelines).
By the way the mobi format has no notion of a page, nada, none.
Dale