Bug in 9.1 not adding title to head

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Arios

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

Good point, Arios. And as of the last group of maintainers, they do so while actively discouraging donations.

Hitch

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by Arios

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

True, I suppose.

I could've made that point too.
But I find invariably that when that point gets made, the complainer-about-an-open-source-project starts talking about how open-source is a horrible idea because the horrible evil developers of horrible evil open-source projects always respond to any sort of "constructive" criticism by lashing out and telling them to stop using it if they don't like it.


But for the sake of completeness, I might as well touch on that as well...
Sigil is open-source. It was written to scratch an itch, and to serve the needs of the developers. It has been graciously shared with us as well.

We have no claim on their efforts. We have no contract forcing them to implement our exact wishes.
All we have, is the ability to suggest things, and hope they agree with us that Sigil would be a better EPUB editor (for their definition of an EPUB editor) if those changes were made.
They have every right to say "no, we don't want it to do that for you, just because we don't like the idea". The fact is, that they do, in fact, care about what WE need an EPUB editor to do, and give away their time to create something guided by our input -- which is above and beyond the fact that they share the hackable source and finished product for free.


If someone really believes that Kevin and Diap don't care about the userbase, then why do they bother posting here at all? I mean, obviously, they will get nowhere, right? Because the developers hate them...
But that isn't even true! Because even the conclusion that @eggheadbooks1's input was being ignored, was... wrong.


P.S. Thanks, peeps, for the karma

[Notjohn]

Originally Posted by Hitch

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.

Thank you for that reassurance, Hitch, because sticking with 0.8.7 (which has never failed me) is what I intend to do for a few months at least. LOVE that built-in Flight Crew! Plug-ins make me nervous. Python makes me nervous. Lots of things make me nervous. Someday when I don't have a book in the works, I'll download 0.9.x and decide if I can cope with it.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Notjohn

Thank you for that reassurance, Hitch, because sticking with 0.8.7 (which has never failed me) is what I intend to do for a few months at least. LOVE that built-in Flight Crew! Plug-ins make me nervous. Python makes me nervous. Lots of things make me nervous. Someday when I don't have a book in the works, I'll download 0.9.x and decide if I can cope with it.

De nada. Nothing wrong with 0.7.x, either.

Hitch

[KevinH]

FWIW, I was able to modify the GumboInterface code to inject an empty title tag into head if one is missing. I have also changed it to coerce all doctypes to either epub2 or epub3 standard.

These changes should appear in the next release. But please understand gumbo is not Tidy so empty open/close tags without attributes are not auto-removed, and etc. If a user see lots of empty open/close tags and wants them removed, he/she can simply use global find and replace to handle that.

Hope this helps.

KevinH

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

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

Most of the time, validation catches some mistake(s) I've done.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Most of the time, validation catches some mistake(s) I've done.

I hate to admit it, but ditto. It's why everyone here--without exception, me included--uses ePUBcheck after we've run FC. Period, end statement.

Hitch

[eggheadbooks1]

Originally Posted by KevinH

FWIW, I was able to modify the GumboInterface code to inject an empty title tag into head if one is missing. I have also changed it to coerce all doctypes to either epub2 or epub3 standard.

These changes should appear in the next release. But please understand gumbo is not Tidy so empty open/close tags without attributes are not auto-removed, and etc. If a user see lots of empty open/close tags and wants them removed, he/she can simply use global find and replace to handle that.

Hope this helps.

KevinH

Thanks!

By the way, I have no idea of the difference between Gumbo or Tidy, only that when I go to save my file, if there is mistake I either get one of two error messages: 1) that line so-and-so is missing an expected element; or 2) that my file is not well formatted and I have the option to fix manually or automatically. I have always chosen to fix manually because one never knows exactly what you will get with automatic. So I have never relied on Gumbo or Tidy to fix anything; I see it only as an early warning signal.

And eschwartz: at no time did I ever say that Sigil's developers do not care about their user base. That is a misinterpretation made for reasons I will not speculate upon because a solution has been found and that's all that matters.

And for the record, I made a small contribution (what I could afford) to Sigil back when John was heading it, and there is a donate button on the new blog, so I'm confused by the claim that the developers actively discourage donations. If they don't want any donations, why the donate button?

I remember asking John why Sigil doesn't go commercial, and he told me it is simple economics: there isn't a large enough user base to make the venture viable. Sigil was created by, as someone said here, to scratch an itch. It's for professional conversion experts, and for people like me who think automated programs like Jutoh or Calibre are awful. But there simply isn't a sufficient market for anyone to quit their day job to pursue. The donate button is there (as it is on many open-source projects) because there is an unwritten contract between users and programmers that says one should pay at least something for the efforts of others, and that it is appreciated when the acknowledgement is made.

I understand that Kovid makes, or at least he did at one point, enough money from donations to Calibre that he was able to make it his full-time job. Calibre is an example of a program with a large user base because it is fully automated; it requires no understanding of HTML unless you want to tweak the formula and/or results. (Calibre only added an editor when Sigil first went down.) So Calibre fits the broader public in a way that Sigil does not. Sigil is a niche product.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by eggheadbooks1

And eschwartz: at no time did I ever say that Sigil's developers do not care about their user base. That is a misinterpretation made for reasons I will not speculate upon because a solution has been found and that's all that matters.

Well, of course...

That is a little trick of mine that I like to call the "inference".

Originally Posted by eggheadbooks1

What made John such as good development coordinator was that he listened to and understood his user base. [...] Thus I find your response perplexing.

You wanna try your hand at inferring meaning from what I say? Go right ahead. I am confident I have straightforward motivations.

...

...

As you say, it doesn't really matter anymore, Kevin was able to find a way to prevent such an error in a safe and nondestructive manner.
And I agree it would be good for Sigil to do as much of the paperwork as it can. While at the same time acknowledging that given a choice between avoiding potentially-destructive changes à la Tidy, and automatically dealing with validation errors on behalf of the user... avoiding destructive changes is the philosophical priority of the Sigil developers (including John).

[KevinH]

FWIW, the Donate button takes you to a page on sigil-ebook.com that says donations are not being accepted at this time. And they won't be. I simply do this for fun and to keep my programming skills from getting rusty, and to help say thanks for all of the other opensource software I have used in the past.

The only reasons the button still exists is that I hate farting with GUI elements and some future developer of Sigil might want it when DiapDealer and I retire.

KevinH

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by eggheadbooks1

And for the record, I made a small contribution (what I could afford) to Sigil back when John was heading it, and there is a donate button on the new blog, so I'm confused by the claim that the developers actively discourage donations. If they don't want any donations, why the donate button?

If you click the donate button, you'll see that it takes you to a page that say's "not currently available." Nor is there a paypal (or any other) link there. There's should be nothing confusing about the claim that the "developers actively discourage donations" because it's true. The fact that donations cannot currently be made is proof of it. The button is left because that could change in the future (or a developer could come on board who wants to recieve donations).

Originally Posted by eggheadbooks1

I remember asking John why Sigil doesn't go commercial, and he told me it is simple economics: there isn't a large enough user base to make the venture viable. Sigil was created by, as someone said here, to scratch an itch. It's for professional conversion experts, and for people like me who think automated programs like Jutoh or Calibre are awful. But there simply isn't a sufficient market for anyone to quit their day job to pursue.

It's even simpler than that. The original creator of Sigil wished it to remain free. That was one of the stipulations when he was looking for someone to take over maintainership (which turned out to be John). Though no such promise was required when Kevin and I took over, it's my intention to continue to honor the wishes of Valloric.

Originally Posted by eggheadbooks1

The donate button is there (as it is on many open-source projects) because there is an unwritten contract between users and programmers that says one should pay at least something for the efforts of others, and that it is appreciated when the acknowledgement is made.

There is no such contract between Sigil users and the current Sigil maintainers. Plain and simple. Use it or don't--just honor the license under which Sigil's released and we're square.

[Notjohn]

I for one express my appreciation here & now. Thank you, guys! It's a wonderful tool.