Paper books still have an advantage

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

You mean HTML uses three-dimensional text? How come I've never seen it?

You just haven't been looking hard enough.

Understanding CSS z-index

In CSS 2.1, each box has a position in three dimensions. In addition to their horizontal and vertical positions, boxes lie along a "z-axis" and are formatted one on top of the other. Z-axis positions are particularly relevant when boxes overlap visually.

[Renate]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

You mean HTML uses three-dimensional text? How come I've never seen it?

In my day we had REAL 3D text.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

You mean HTML uses three-dimensional text? How come I've never seen it?

Your ebooks don't look like this?

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by Renate

In my day we had REAL 3D text.

Oh, you beat me to the joke

[Sarmat89]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

You mean HTML uses three-dimensional text?

HTML is 1-dimensional. You have to use pictures or MathML (which is not widely supported) to have any vertical freedom.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Sarmat89

HTML is 1-dimensional. You have to use pictures or MathML (which is not widely supported) to have any vertical freedom.

Your definition of 1-dimensional seems a bit idiosyncratic. Placement on the x/y axis would qualify as two dimensional. Adding in the z axis would give you three dimensions. Have you ever looked at WebGL? Or has the smoke from the burning books rendered you unable to do so?

[Sarmat89]

But you cannot control the Y axis. Your document is one single run of characters that is broken into lines outside of your control. You cannot place anything below or above the line, cannot synchronize the distinct lines, can't even place things aside. Gutenberg could do what HTML can not, because HTML was never intended for books. The fact that is was intended for documentation is evident from the list of its elements. There was no poetry or text alignment, but THREE different elements for formatting computer programs.

[Renate]

Originally Posted by Sarmat89

Your document is one single run of characters...

There is some truth in what you're saying, but it's a bit overblown.
Text has always been in some sense a continuous stream.
In HTML there are all sorts of positioning possibilities.
It seems to answer the requirements of many users.
May I suggest SVG or PDF if you are more particular.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Sarmat89

But you cannot control the Y axis. Your document is one single run of characters that is broken into lines outside of your control. You cannot place anything below or above the line, cannot synchronize the distinct lines, can't even place things aside. Gutenberg could do what HTML can not, because HTML was never intended for books. The fact that is was intended for documentation is evident from the list of its elements. There was no poetry or text alignment, but THREE different elements for formatting computer programs.

Hmmm... the books I've been reading with furigana don't exist? As for control? What control do I have over a printed book that I purchase? And if you think there is no control over where lines are broken in HTML, I would suggest that you take a remedial CSS class since there are multiple ways of controlling line breaks.

Which three elements for formatting computer programs? If you are thinking of the text align options (right, left and justify), I seem to remember those predating HTML by centuries. If you are thinking of the code, kbd, samp, var and pre, that's a bit more than three and several would not be able to be applied to a physical book.

[Sarmat89]

LISTING, XMP, and another one which I don't recall.

Any desktop publishing program which creates physical books can use tabulations to align lines, create ditto lists, align to a character, make vertical breaks necessary for poetry, etc. It can group lines with an element like caption or bracket; with some manual adjustment, it can place elements over and under lines, create columns and insets — all of which is beyond the capabilities of HTML.

[Quoth]

Computer programs only use left in left to right languages. Most text editors only had space, tab and newline as "formatting".

Movable type is pretty much linear like HTML. Hypertext before Tim Berners-Lee was for documents. His HTML was for documents, not computer programs. Computer programs only need one enclosing tag, <pre>
https://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_pre.asp
And it is in HTML 2.0, which was the first version widely used on the internet
https://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html-spec/....html#SEC5.5.2
See https://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html-spec/

With the addition of CSS there is 1:1 mapping of wordprocessor styles to css.

Anything other than sequential text using movable type needed an engraved plate until photo-lithographic typesetting took over. Also movable type existed in China long before Caxton. Europe had book printing before Gutenberg (who predated Caxton). A plate was engraved for each page. It was a lot slower and errors were left in due time to make a replacement plate. The letterpress or movable type allowed corrections after a proof print was made. It was actually less flexible on layout and the text would be reused, thus a later print run needed the book to be re-set, whereas the older plate per page system might have the plates in storage longer before melting down.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Sarmat89

LISTING, XMP, and another one which I don't recall.

Any desktop publishing program which creates physical books can use tabulations to align lines, create ditto lists, align to a character, make vertical breaks necessary for poetry, etc. It can group lines with an element like caption or bracket; with some manual adjustment, it can place elements over and under lines, create columns and insets — all of which is beyond the capabilities of HTML.

Let's see you do the above with a hot metal typesetting machine since you mentioned this being doable since Gutenberg. Now you are dragging modern desktop publishing programs into the discussion.

Oddly, much of what you claim can not be done with ebooks, I've seen done. It may take some expertise but most of it is doable. For instance, you've never used a figure element with a figcaption?

As for LISTING? There are various tags for creating lists but <listing> does not seem to be one of them and I have never seen the list tags used to list computer code. <code> would be the preferred tag. The <xmp> tag is used to display HTML without interpreting it and in a monospace font.

Considering the number of tags used in HTML5, it's would be more than strange if there weren't a few useful for computer oriented text when viewed on a computer display without interpreting it which is not something that a paper book needs to worry about. Admittedly there were PaperByte™ scannable machine code listings a few decades back.

[Fat Abe]

Originally Posted by issybird

Poetry is an example where I think paper is better.

Absolutely. The typography can even be a part of the expressiveness and author's design ideas.

No ebook or ebook reader will ever be as valuable as collector books in paper form.

https://themarketherald.com.au/fancy...pts-ever-sold/

Is there any ebook that can compare to seeing the Rothschild Prayer Book, in person?

Also, we'll see who's laughing when an EMP blast wipes out an entire collection of digital books.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by Fat Abe

Also, we'll see who's laughing when an EMP blast wipes out an entire collection of digital books.

Man, let that happen and their will be much bigger fish to fry.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Fat Abe

Absolutely. The typography can even be a part of the expressiveness and author's design ideas.

No ebook or ebook reader will ever be as valuable as collector books in paper form.

https://themarketherald.com.au/fancy...pts-ever-sold/

Perhaps we should go back to the days when books were handwritten by scribes and only the wealthy could afford to own a book?

Originally Posted by Fat Abe

Is there any ebook that can compare to seeing the Rothschild Prayer Book, in person?

And at $13 million in 2014 at Christies, how many of us can afford to own it?

Originally Posted by Fat Abe

Also, we'll see who's laughing when an EMP blast wipes out an entire collection of digital books.

Hmmm... considering the current technology in producing EMP bursts with enough power to wipe digital devices over a fairly wide area moves us into the range of NEMP (nuclear electromagnetic pulse) or a theoretical high power solar flare, I suspect very few people will be laughing after such an event. Unless, of course, you are the type who finds apocalypses to be humourous.

I did have some fun years back using an old camera flash and a copper wound iron rod to generate a small scale EMP generator. A very similar idea can be found at WikiHow's How to Make an Electromagnetic Pulse and several other places on the Internet.