Quote:
Originally Posted by Lbooker
So in the end who was right?
Tuna or kovidgoyal?
Right now I guess that kovidgoyal must be right because the other programmers who chose to implement epub decoders that way must have done so for good reasons.
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Laughing here - there isn't a
right way, just the way that best suits your needs. As Korvid says above, for his needs (a viewer on a PC that is a supplement to the main functionality of Callibre), he uses a standard renderer library 'off the shelf'. On the whole he doesn't need to obsess about memory footprint, rendering speed and so on. For most purposes there are many libraries that are good enough to do the job and as he rightly says, what's the point in re-inventing the wheel?
As for other programmers, the decisions they make will have been based on many trade offs - what requirements had been drawn up, what libraries were conveniently available to them, how much time and money they had, what their specialities were and so on. For many operations, something that's "good enough" is, well, good enough.
However, consider that web browsers have been around for 15 years or so now and Javascript nearly as long, yet something like Chrome can come along and demonstrate massive performance improvements by taking a fresh approach to the problem. In areas like this, one or two guys who have the time and enthusiasm for starting from scratch can make a real difference.