Quote:
Originally Posted by Robert Marquard
No, i am arguing on a different level.
There are two forms of ebooks. One concentrating on keeping the experience of paper books while adding some features (mainly navigational not presentational). this is where typography and static pages are the focus. The other form goes for new experiences with text. This means allowing reflow of the text and the many dynamic features HTML allows. This makes the presentation dynamic so some typographic content has to be dropped (usually because it cannot be rendered).
For most of the texts typographical detail is irrelevant because they have none. The separation of content and presentation allows to make the text independent from the presentation device. This is why the majority of ebooks is in HTML not PDF. There is room and need for both forms of ebooks, but not for equal shares on the market.
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I also believe that there's a need for both format, but I don't consider that HTML separates content from presentation. An XML format with special tags for books and semantic information would be much more suited for this task.
HTML wasn't designed for books, but some of its basic tags can still be useful. Extending this set of tags with special tags for books formatting, the structure of the text (for all sorts of text, the structure of a novel is quite different from a play) and metadata would be the right solution.
If the readers themselves, can't render the structure of the book using such tags, we can still use stylesheets or some software to transform for example a <chapter> tag into a TOC at the beginning of the text, and a real chapter heading.