Quote:
Originally Posted by RootlessAgrarian
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.
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Sarcasm is rarely helpful.
The average epub user doesn't care that his epub file doesn't conform to the epub spec, he just wants to fix errors/improve layout etc. He only cares that the file displays correctly on his reading device.
The people who care about their epub file meeting the specification already use tools like epubcheck to verify the basic requirements. If you care about meeting the specification, the prerequisite is that you know it.
Guessing the language according to the system locale is a bad idea, since it lulls you into believing that you don't have to worry about setting a language directly. And then you create an epub in a different language and now your epub has incorrect information.
Not to mention other people (like for instance,
me) who use a different locale than the majority of the books they create. And then you're
still left with the title and author, so you have to open the Meta Editor either way. There's no way around this.
And you're still ignoring the main problem: Sigil can't guess the author or the book title. Nothing can. Case closed.
Bottom line, guessing is error-prone (hence, guessing). I'm against it. I'd rather force the user to make sure he used the correct information than have him curse my name when the guessing game bites him and causes considerable damage. I choose to err on the side of caution.
The only recourse is to provide a warning on export if some of this information is missing, and the user can either act on this or ignore it if he doesn't care.
Quote:
Originally Posted by RootlessAgrarian
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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And how many
desktop applications do you know that do this?