Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
I know RTF can be edited with a text edtor, but it's not all that easy to deal with. So to me RTF doesn't really count.
Most eBook readers do not handle HTML all that well if at all.
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So because the firmware doesn't handle HTML, does that mean it's not a viable alternative. (Lots of firmwares don't handle EPUB currently either.) Most e-book reader don't handle it because it would be too much competition for their DRM'ed format. HTML is far more universal than any e-book reader format. (although not necessarily as an E-book format. Still, look at Gutenberg.)
As for RTF, if you ignore the header blocks, it's not that complex. Much of it's eye readable, with commands such a PAR for paragraph, TAB for tab, and \i to start italics and \i0 to end them. Now there are some special line proportionality commands that are obscure, and pictures are not compressed, but fixing typo's with simple word processors is easy.
I find XML, enclosed by a ZIP wrapper, enclosed by another wrapper to allow DRM, to be a non-simple typo fix format without specialized processors to do the job. If half the level of effort needed to implement EPUB was placed into implementing HTML, most e-book readers would have magnificent HTML readers. I notice that the readers from companies
without e-book store tie-ins are the ones that have pretty good HTML readers. So does openinkpot. It's the ones with e-book tie-ins that don't have it - SONY, Amazon, CyBook.