<div> instead of <p>?

[ElMiko]

This may be recency bias, but i feel like I've been seeing more and more epubs that use <div> to enclose basic text instead of <p>. That is, narry a <p> to be found throughout the whole book.

To my untrained eye this seems... kinda puzzling. Is there a good reason for this kind of substitution? Does <p> have outlier cases where it fails and <div> doesn't?

[Jellby]

Probably generated with some software that creates only <div>s and <span>s?

[KevinH]

Replacing p with div is just horrible from a semantic meaning basis. Code like that is broken imho, and as Jellby stated ... probably machine generated.

[JSWolf]

When I find those awful (IMHO) ePub with <div> instead of <p>, I replace the <div> with <p> where it should be <p>. And because the <div> and </div> are on separate lines, I search/replace all the lines so they run on. Then I use Modify ePub to split the lines properly. I will go through the code to see if I missed any <div> that should be <p>.

Does anyone know what software is being used to screw with <p>?

[DNSB]

I do much the same but since the divs have classes, I replace only those <div class="whatever">...</div> blocks that are where a paragraph or header tag should be.

The only pain is where there are nested divs ( <div class="flush_para"><div class="italic_text"> for example ) which do take a bit of manual cleanup.

[Sarmat89]

People are using div's because it prevents empty lines between paragraphs.

[Turtle91]

Why not just style the paragraph css appropriately?? Or if it’s the device inserting extra space when it shouldn’t, get a new device…. Or complain to the manufacturer!!

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Sarmat89

People are using div's because it prevents empty lines between paragraphs.

That makes a tiny bit of sense if they only use <p> as the device default may have a margin.
But WHY not set a margin: 0 if that is what is wanted?

To me, <div> is a container to keep a grouping together. (pagebreak-inside-avoid)

[hobnail]

I get those occasionally. I have an involved song and dance for how I convert a Kindle book to epub. Part of the work is done when Calibre converts it. The final/second step is opening it in Sigil and taking a big sledgehammer to its CSS with the following regexp which replaces these with nothing:

(  display: block;
|  font-size: .*
|  letter-spacing:.*
|  line-break: strict;
|  line-height: .*
| page-break-after:.*
| page-break-before:.*
| page-break-inside:.*
|  vertical-align: .*
|  white-space: pre-wrap;
)

If I see it using divs for paragraphs I use Diap's gizmo to convert all divs that are using the class it's using to ps.

This often messes up the chapter titles making them the same size as the paragraph text because many if not most ebooks use the p tag instead of the h tags for chapter titles (another unforgivable sin).

Edit: I should fix the above regexp and instead of having a space after the colon use a regexp for 0 or more spaces. I'm guessing that calibre's conversion is always putting a space after the colon.

[Moonbase59]

What really annoys me is that you see more and more of this crap in expensive e-books from large publishers. The code often looks like machine-generated, or at least done by complete idiots. Also, there’s often stuff in it to fight deficiencies of single readers.

I mean, hey, in what market are we? Pay $10–30 for a book and then have to invest hours to repair it?! It really, really sucks.

Besides, not everybody has the tools or the knowledge.

[Quoth]

I had one ebook from a large publisher all <div> instead of <p>
From every point of view that's stupidity. If <div> is used at all, it's an extra level of structure, not a tag for body paragraphs. Clue even in the name.

How do they even manage such stupidity?

I've only spent hours "repairing" an ebook if it's badly proofed OCR to be almost unreadable and it's part of a series and otherwise unobtainable. All of those from Amazon. I learnt years ago to only download PDFs from archive dot org, because their auto generated ebook formats are an insult and mostly unusable.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Sarmat89

People are using div's because it prevents empty lines between paragraphs.

That's rubbish. You can use <p> without any paragraph spaces.

CSS for <p>

p {
  margin-top: 0;
  margin-bottom: 0;
  widows: 1;
  orphans: 1;
  text-indent: 1.2em;
}

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by theducks

…
To me, <div> is a container …

Yes. So for a simple novel with no illustrations you might only have one, for the cover!

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Yes. So for a simple novel with no illustrations you might only have one, for the cover!

You gets <div> used a lot in place of <blockquote> (this annoys me) and sometimes <div> for the chapter header and then there are the empy <div> we sometimes get. If the ePub is ePub3, we may get <figure> instead of <div> for images.

So yes, there can be <div> even if the only images are the cover and the title page.

[Sarmat89]

Originally Posted by Quoth

From every point of view that's stupidity.

DIV is a generic block type. It works as good as P, but requires less work to generate.