Quote:
Originally Posted by kovidgoyal
Just so you know: epubcheck is totally meaningless. A file that *passes* epubcheck may or may not work with any given epub renderer. A file that *does not pass* epubcheck may or may not work with any given epub renderer.
The best that could possibly be said about epubcheck (and I wouldn't be comfortable saying this without actual data) is that a file that passes epubcheck may be more likely than a file that does not pass to render correctly with most epub viewers. Even if this were true it would most likely be so because files that tend to pass epubcheck tend, on average, to have extremely simple markup, as they are typically the product of machine translation from some extremely simple format.
What I'm trying to say is that the things that epubcheck checks are those things that it is easiest to write software to check, not those things that are most likely to cause problems, or those things that are most likely to occur in the wild.
What epubcheck is good for, is those situations where you have absolutely no idea why your epub file is not rendering with a particular renderer. In that case, you can try running epubcheck on it and fix the errors it points out. Of course, that may or may not fix your actual problem. And even for this use case, epubcheck is extremely sub-optimal since its error messages are incredibly unhelpful.
That's my epubcheck jeremiad for this week.
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Even though I do not totally agree with what you say, I can certainly see your point and confirm that there is a lot of truth in it. When you hit a specific problem that epubcheck should have caught in your opinion, could you make a note of it and either post this stuff somewhere, or send me a message, or create an issue for epubcheck? This way it can be improved to be a more useful tool.