Bug in 9.1 not adding title to head

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by Doitsu

@DiapDealer: it does write the title to the html file, at least in my version.

Yep. That's the button I'm seeing too.

[KevinH]

Hi,

I have to agree with DiapDealer here. Failure to validate is NOT a bug. Sigil is a tool to help you convert your material to epub format, and to allow you to validate it if you so desire and make whatever changes you may need. Many ebooks do not validate. Nor should they have to if they work on the intended device. This is exactly the philosophy used by Kovid and Calibre as well.

If you do not know even basic (x)html, Sigil is probably not the tool you will want to use.
And any validation output will be hard for you to understand. There may be better tools for you to use. Toxaris's word to epub tools may be more appropriate or saving as an epub with Pages if you work on a Mac.

Hope this helps,

KevinH

[DiapDealer]

Also keep in mind that if Sigil v0.8.6 works well for someone, then there is no pressing need to upgrade to the 0.9.x version(s). And I say that without an ounce of rancor. I stuck with Sigil 0.3.x for a long, long time myself.

[BetterRed]

In Word 2010 I know of 4 ways to enter the Title into the document metadata, which should appear in the <title></title> tags in filtered HTML. In the Save As dialogue, in the Properties Panel, in the Advanced Properties and in the built-in Title Field (Insert->Quickparts). There are probably others.

There are also macro's around that will shove the file name into the Title

BR

[eggheadbooks1]

On the Save As dialog, when I change to Web Page, Filtered, a "Change Title" button appears. If I click it and enter something, title tags with that something are added to the html output. Why on earth does Word create html with no title tags anyway?

Found it. Thanks. And yes, you would think that if you have the option to change the title, then the original title would appear in the HTML. But that's Word.

Again, though, the average user is not going to know this. More importantly, if, as Kevin says, "using the name of the file as a 'title' is not a good idea to say the least," then putting in any title is a bad thing, and thus clicking on Change Title and inputting the title is not good. (I tried clicking on Change Title and leaving it blank, thinking perhaps that maybe Word would add the tag but without any content, but no luck.)

Instead one needs to know that the title tag must now be added when importing a Word HTML file into Sigil because the program has changed since it last did this automatically. If you don't add the tag, the file will fail validation.

Failure to validate is NOT a bug ... Many ebooks do not validate. Nor should they have to if they work on the intended device...

Failure to validate will cause the ePub to be rejected by retailers such as Apple, Kobo, B&N, etc, and by the better aggregators. Most users of Sigil, as far as I understand, are building commercial ePubs, either for themselves or clients.

If you do not know even basic (x)html, Sigil is probably not the tool you will want to use. And any validation output will be hard for you to understand. There may be better tools for you to use.

Kevin, I do know basic HTML, and have been a Sigil user for about four years now. I was one of those John approached when he took over, asking for feedback on future development. I was approached because I am a typical user and John wanted to make the program work for typical users.

I have been an avid promoter of Sigil. And I can understand the gist of the validation output -- I've managed this far. But I am not a programmer nor do I want to be. I didn't have to be while using Sigil before: the important elements, like building the heading code for example, were automated. Since I understood the basics, Sigil worked well for me.

What made John such as good development coordinator was that he listened to and understood his user base. Sure, there were those that were dumber than dumb, but I'm not. After all, I did find the solution on my own. My intention by starting this post is to bring to your attention a change/bug/revision that has caused a problem for your users. I'm not going to be the only one who runs into this problem. Thus I find your response perplexing.

[Capricorn]

I find this discussion very interesting. I am also an average book reader with only basic html understanding. Due to all the changes in sigil, the question - as far as I am concerned - boils down to: what is the best way to validate the epub, and catch all mistakes, going forward with this version of sigil?
So far, I check the css with the right-click menu option "validate with W3C". Then I run the gumbo parser (green button). After that, I validate the rest by starting flightcrew plugin, correct mistakes, repeat flightcrew plugin, correct mistakes,....etc. At the end of that, I run epubcheck plugin to be sure nothing is left in terms of mistakes.
So far, that seems to catch most stuff.
Is that how we are supposed to do it or are there better ways as there may be mistakes we do not catch that way?
Of course, the above process still assumes that, when you find a mistake and do not understand it (as an average book reader), you go out on to the forum in order to figure out what the hell went wrong. Which can be time-consuming at first. But I figured out quite a few things that way. And through trial and error.
I suppose this is what has been said in the above posts: if you do not understand it, ask in the forum.
And this forum has been quite amazing. I ask very basic questions and people still try to help me. Utterly brilliant.

Anyway, any and all feedback as to the optimal way of working (to catch mistakes in the epub) would be extremely interesting to me.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by Capricorn

Anyway, any and all feedback as to the optimal way of working (to catch mistakes in the epub) would be extremely interesting to me.

I think you're doing all you can do. The only thing that might slip through the cracks are device-specific quirks (quirks that often defy the epub specifications).

Validate CSS
Sanity Check
Flightcrew validation
EPubcheck validation

If an error message is unclear to you ... search/ask and learn.

[KevinH]

Originally Posted by eggheadbooks1

What made John such as good development coordinator was that he listened to and understood his user base. Sure, there were those that were dumber than dumb, but I'm not. After all, I did find the solution on my own. My intention by starting this post is to bring to your attention a change/bug/revision that has caused a problem for your users. I'm not going to be the only one who runs into this problem. Thus I find your response perplexing.

My response was to your vehement argument that this is a bug. It is not. It is a change. A change induced by moving away from Tidy. If that bothers you, then please stay with the Tidy version of Sigil 0.8.6. Tidy will do lots of cleaning for you (up to and including losing large pieces of code). The entire point of the move away from Tidy was to give the ebook author more control over how the finished ebook looks and to greatly reduce the potential for the loss of text. In addition, Tidy is not html5 ready which makes it unsuitable for modern html5 and epub3.

There are many issues that prevent an ebook from validating and Sigil never handled them all (you will still need to properly set the minimal metadata, etc). So all versions of Sigil expect the user to understand the product they are producing. If validation is important to you, then simply run epubcheck or flightcrew and fix the errors you have, just as before. If you want stronger auto-fixing, then use the Tidy version of Sigil. I don't know of any ebook reader who will fail to render the page if no title is present.

If there is demand, and if the new html5 Tidy is buildable/working, I may create a Tidy plugin.

That is all I can offer. Frankly comparing a missing title if and only if it was missing in the input in Sigil-0.9.x to the potential for lost text, stripped mathml, broken svg, and wholesale changes of Sigil-0.8.x's Tidy, I would go with Sigil-0.9.x. And fwiw, user-none agreed with me on the need to remove Tidy and Xerces.

Thanks for your feedback.

KevinH

[KevinH]

Originally Posted by eggheadbooks1

Again, though, the average user is not going to know this. More importantly, if, as Kevin says, "using the name of the file as a 'title' is not a good idea to say the least," then putting in any title is a bad thing, and thus clicking on Change Title and inputting the title is not good.

That is not what I said at all. You seem to be quite contrarian here to make a point. Simply put in any appropriate title. It will not matter. Put in the chapter title or document title. All I said was that it is a bad idea to use the name of the file as the title. A filename can be renamed and Sigil might do so if there are name clashes automatically - and that is all versions of Sigil, makng the title meaningless or even confusing. Pick a relevant title for the material. Most e-readers will not display it but some accessibility code can read it to try and help a user with those needs navigate automatically.

KevinH

[Capricorn]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

I think you're doing all you can do. The only thing that might slip through the cracks are device-specific quirks (quirks that often defy the epub specifications).

Validate CSS
Sanity Check
Flightcrew validation
EPubcheck validation

If an error message is unclear to you ... search/ask and learn.

That is very good to know. Many thanks for confirming my work flow.

Device-specific quirks - yeah, I have come across a few. It took me ages and lots of forum searches to realise they were device-specific (as I had no other device to compare it with; that has now changed). And indeed had absolutely nothing to do with the epub spec.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by KevinH

My response was to your vehement argument that this is a bug. It is not. It is a change. A change induced by moving away from Tidy. If that bothers you, then please stay with the Tidy version of Sigil 0.8.6. Tidy will do lots of cleaning for you (up to and including losing large pieces of code). The entire point of the move away from Tidy was to give the ebook author more control over how the finished ebook looks and to greatly reduce the potential for the loss of text. In addition, Tidy is not html5 ready which makes it unsuitable for modern html5 and epub3.

We've stayed with 0.8.x for some time now. I've only in the last few days installed 0.9.x, as part of my interest in helping out on the docs. For commercial bookbuilding, I think that the end of the 0.8 series is a better choice, if you don't have significant XHTML/CSS and device experience.

There are many issues that prevent an ebook from validating and Sigil never handled them all (you will still need to properly set the minimal metadata, etc). So all versions of Sigil expect the user to understand the product they are producing. If validation is important to you, then simply run epubcheck or flightcrew and fix the errors you have, just as before. If you want stronger auto-fixing, then use the Tidy version of Sigil. I don't know of any ebook reader who will fail to render the page if no title is present.

If there is demand, and if the new html5 Tidy is buildable/working, I may create a Tidy plugin.

That is all I can offer. Frankly comparing a missing title if and only if it was missing in the input in Sigil-0.9.x to the potential for lost text, stripped mathml, broken svg, and wholesale changes of Sigil-0.8.x's Tidy, I would go with Sigil-0.9.x. And fwiw, user-none agreed with me on the need to remove Tidy and Xerces.

Thanks for your feedback.

KevinH

I can tell you without blinking that we've had issues, more than once, with something stupid like "en" getting nuked from the metadata, and failing intake. And, of course, we find out AFTER we'd given it to the client. It happens all the time, particularly if you get slammed, and a bookmaker forgets to validate the ePUB. Unless a non-commercial (or, arguably, commercial; there are plenty of pretend-pikers out there claiming to know what they are doing, using those types of tools) bookmaker wants to use a tool like Jutoh or Scrivener's ePUB-output, there's always going to be the opportunity to fall flat on your face. {shrug}. ePUB simply isn't a Word file, and Sigil doesn't have all the "catch you if you fall" mechanisms built in that the more-end-user oriented programs do. Hell, it's how we all learn. Having seen half a book eaten by Tidy, (which, fortunately, we'd already saved--once burned, twice shy), I'm with Kevin on that one.

On a bright note, at least there's an ePUBcheck plugin now. I'm quite appreciate of that. Makes it easier and faster to find what you've screwed up. That's a happy thing right there.

Hitch

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by eggheadbooks1

Again, though, the average user is not going to know this. More importantly, if, as Kevin says, "using the name of the file as a 'title' is not a good idea to say the least," then putting in any title is a bad thing, and thus clicking on Change Title and inputting the title is not good. (I tried clicking on Change Title and leaving it blank, thinking perhaps that maybe Word would add the tag but without any content, but no luck.)

Instead one needs to know that the title tag must now be added when importing a Word HTML file into Sigil because the program has changed since it last did this automatically. If you don't add the tag, the file will fail validation.



Failure to validate will cause the ePub to be rejected by retailers such as Apple, Kobo, B&N, etc, and by the better aggregators. Most users of Sigil, as far as I understand, are building commercial ePubs, either for themselves or clients.

Sigil's job is to help you create working EPUBs.
Validation plugins are your best bet for making sure that the book validates.

As has been said, Sigil never fixed everything, always, automagically.
And Sigil is moving away from fixing things automatically, in the hopes of empowering users and not eating their books anymore.

AFAIK, Sigil still creates a valid stub file for you, but if you import files as-is from elsewhere, you will have to make sure they are properly made.

Kevin, I do know basic HTML, and have been a Sigil user for about four years now. I was one of those John approached when he took over, asking for feedback on future development. I was approached because I am a typical user and John wanted to make the program work for typical users.

I have been an avid promoter of Sigil. And I can understand the gist of the validation output -- I've managed this far. But I am not a programmer nor do I want to be. I didn't have to be while using Sigil before: the important elements, like building the heading code for example, were automated. Since I understood the basics, Sigil worked well for me.

What made John such as good development coordinator was that he listened to and understood his user base. Sure, there were those that were dumber than dumb, but I'm not. After all, I did find the solution on my own. My intention by starting this post is to bring to your attention a change/bug/revision that has caused a problem for your users. I'm not going to be the only one who runs into this problem. Thus I find your response perplexing.

That was uncalled for.

The fact that Kevin and Diap disagree with you about the best approach does not mean they don't care about their user base. If they didn't care about their userbase they wouldn't have bothered to take over maintenance (and Sigil would still be dead in the water). And if John thought they didn't understand the userbase, he wouldn't've passed the reins on.

[eschwartz]

What I wan to know, is why the heck is title a required element? It is useless -- as far as I know, no reader even looks at it.

You can put literally anything there, and NOTHING will know the difference. At least, not if it is treating it as a part of an ebook.

But of course it is required by XHTML.
I still don't see why EpubCheck looks for it.

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by Hitch

I can tell you without blinking that we've had issues, more than once, with something stupid like "en" getting nuked from the metadata, and failing intake. [...]
On a bright note, at least there's an ePUBcheck plugin now. I'm quite appreciate of that. Makes it easier and faster to find what you've screwed up.

Shameless plug: The latest version of the KindleGen Sigil plugin will warn you, if the language and title metadata entries are missing. Unlike kindlegen, it'll also warn you if the cover image metadata entry or the recommended TOC and SRL Kindle guide items are missing. (It's backwards-compatible with Sigil 0.8.x.)

[Arios]

eschwartz to add another argument to your post (# 27), it must be stressed that Sigil is free and maintained by volunteer work.