Quote:
Originally Posted by rogue_ronin
That <span class="....> stuff is bad XHTML. The simplest way to do those is with <em> (emphasis) and <strong>. If you're seeing a lot of <span...>, it's because of the overuse of Word, and other programs that insert a lot of cruft.
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I absolutely definitely could not disagree more. Or to put it another way I think the statement above totally incorrect.
I was designing websites long before I got into ebooks, and when designing websites settled happily into the habit of always checking that my XHTML and CSS were consistent with World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards - doing so very much increased the chances that my websites would display consistently on different browsers.
ePub is based on XHTML version 1.1 - it's right there in the specs. How can one expect to get consistent presentations if one does not live up to the basic fundamental standards of XHTML?
I know there are fudges and work arounds, and I know that they work sometimes. But in my opinion the first step in getting ePubs to appear consistently well in a range of readers is to get the original XHTML to meet standards.
I also accept without hesitation that it would be good to set up other standards - margin width etc - and that it would be good to find out how many people prefer serif rather than non-serif fonts, how many people prefer justified rather than ragged right margins, how many people prefer margins separated by an empty line and how many by paragraph indent, and so on.
But let's start from the basics. In my opinion the basic tool for writing a good, consistent ePub book is a good HTML editor and to get that XHTML to meet W3C standards.
Finally, and a little off topic, for website designers CSS is your friend, and external CSS is your best friend. It is dead simple to remove the empty line between paragraphs with CSS, set it once, and do it consistently.
Regards, Alex