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Originally Posted by Valloric
Do you really want your editor to "guess" at your book's title, author and language? This is one of the things you have to make sure you include yourself.
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Ah, I see -- Sigil is intended for use by people who already know the XML spec for EPUB? OK. I assumed it was meant to hide expert knowledge and guide the newbie -- in which case, user pre-knowledge of the names of metadata elements, and which ones are required, would not be a given (as in fact it wasn't in my case). If it's intended to be a helper app for people who already know the spec then I agree it should not do more than warn/remind.
If Sigil did want to be more newbie-friendly... perhaps in the metadata editor, any missing *required* elements for a structure could be created with value BLANK and visually highlighted, so if you pop open the editor you immediately see that the doc is damaged or incomplete? Most every commercial Web form on the planet flags (w/asterisks, colour, boldface, etc) "required fields" -- it's a visual convention familiar to most 'net users.
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What Sigil can do (and will, in time) is warn you that you failed to specify this information. But that's as far as it can go.
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Yes a simple warning would also be reasonable, particularly at Save or Save As time:
"This EPUB is missing some required elements of the metadata structure: title, author and language. See (URL) for correct keywords and valid values for these elements. This EPUB will not pass most validity checkers."
One last thought... Couldn't 'language' be inferred -- if left uninitialised -- from the local environment? It wouldn't be infallible (my LANG may be en, but I may also read/author documents in French from time to time). But it might be a good starting guess.
"Element 'language' missing from metadata. Initialised to best-guess 'en' from local language configuration."