Sigil issue or iBooks issue?

[kovidgoyal]

The EPUB standard is a typical example of a standard that has been ruined by having too many cooks. It has too many features, with too many caveats trying to cover too many use cases. It ends up not covering many useful use cases, making the implementation of other useful use cases too hard and forcing any would be implementers to jump through three million microscopic hoops in order to "comply" with it. What a waste of electrons.

These kinds of standards are almost never implemented fully. They presumably exist for one reason only, to keep the standard writers from doing something even worse, like starting a world war.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

The EPUB standard is a typical example of a standard that has been ruined by having too many cooks. It has too many features, with too many caveats trying to cover too many use cases. It ends up not covering many useful use cases, making the implementation of other useful use cases too hard and forcing any would be implementers to jump through three million microscopic hoops in order to "comply" with it. What a waste of electrons.

These kinds of standards are almost never implemented fully. They presumably exist for one reason only, to keep the standard writers from doing something even worse, like starting a world war.

Amen, brother.

Hitch

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by theducks

Usually standards are a super-set because the Standard did not support 'x'

IEEE488=>HPIB (in this case, the standard, was made AFTERWARDS)
How many extensions of BASIC were there? Pascal? Fortran? (those I have used)

'EPUB' versions seem to leave out big chunks or fail to do them properly.
Some you might blame on being part of the first generation e-books. But by EPUB2, those should have dwindled to a tiny-tiny list.
not so

Well ePub 2 is really the first ePub standard although OEB (Open eBook) was available earlier by the same team. OEB as a standard did not ship any product that would read it. Instead it was used like Kindle does today to create a proprietary format. Microsoft LIT, Mobipocket, and IMP were all based on OEB. Read about this in our wiki.

So ePub 2 is a first generation of any standard that required eBook readers to interpret it without much actual guidance.

Dale