Quote:
Originally Posted by charleski
A web page is a very different thing to an ebook. It serves a different purpose and is used in a different manner.
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No argument here.
Quote:
Originally Posted by charleski
While web design has inherited many elements from large-format book design, it has (quite rightly) branched out in entirely different directions. While they both use similar languages (html/xhtml and css), those are merely tools that can be put to very different purposes.
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Still no argument.
Quote:
Originally Posted by charleski
Any epub that didn't use any styling code to override the default rules would be a joke.
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And I agree with this too. I've never said epub books should be laid out as web pages, I'm just saying that skills and knowledge used in web development (XHTML and CSS) are more pertinent to epub creation than those from traditional typesetting.
You just confirmed this: any epub book not using specific CSS code looks amateurish. How many traditional typesetters/typographers/etc know CSS? I'd bet the number is very low.
And by "layout" being up to the Reading Systems, I meant the actual text layout. As in the way paragraphs and lines flow and break, tracking, kerning etc. You can't control that when creating an epub book, and it's very important for physical books. Those would be the skills from traditional typography that are sadly left wasted for ebooks.