"Check book" complains about hyphens

[vr8ce]

Why does "Check book" complain about the various CSS "hyphens" directives (hyphens, -epub-hyphens, -webkit-hyphens, etc.)? The directives appear to have been in the epub spec since at least 2.x, and it's part of the CSS3 spec as well. Just about any epub guide that I've seen tells you to use them. These kinds of false positives make it more difficult to go through "real" errors in the check.

(If this has been covered before, I apologize. I've never been able to get MobileRead's "Search" to work — I always get an API error message, on multiple browsers, over several months of trying.)

[theducks]

Remember
CSS rules apply to more the ebooks.
ebooks are a subset usage

for most cases, these cause no problems for personal use (and it isn't the device that has issues.) It's the publishers rigid, check rules. Some even complain about VALID code

[kovidgoyal]

EPUB 2 uses CSS 2 and they are not part of CSS 2.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by vr8ce

Why does "Check book" complain about the various CSS "hyphens" directives (hyphens, -epub-hyphens, -webkit-hyphens, etc.)? The directives appear to have been in the epub spec since at least 2.x, and it's part of the CSS3 spec as well. Just about any epub guide that I've seen tells you to use them. These kinds of false positives make it more difficult to go through "real" errors in the check.

(If this has been covered before, I apologize. I've never been able to get MobileRead's "Search" to work — I always get an API error message, on multiple browsers, over several months of trying.)

AFAIR, most of those directives are not part of the epub spec. If I feed my stylesheets through the W3C CSS Validation Service, it comes up with these errors:

Sample output:

9 		-epub-hyphens is an unknown vendor extension
10 		-webkit-hyphens is an unknown vendor extension
11 		-moz-hyphens is an unknown vendor extension
12 		Property adobe-hyphenate doesn't exist

The only one that gets accepted is hyphens : none; if I set the css level to 3.

For an old thread, see Kobo, Kindle, KOReader and hyphenation for some discussion.

[vr8ce]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

EPUB 2 uses CSS 2 and they are not part of CSS 2.

Every Kindle book I've purchased in the last couple of years has these directives.

When editing an existing book that has them, showing them as errors are false positives; they're noise. Please consider an option to turn them off.

Thanks!

[vr8ce]

Originally Posted by theducks

Remember
CSS rules apply to more the ebooks.
ebooks are a subset usage

for most cases, these cause no problems for personal use (and it isn't the device that has issues.) It's the publishers rigid, check rules. Some even complain about VALID code

I do remember that, but it's irrelevant here — Calibre is an ebook editor. Ebooks are the only context for this CSS. And these directives came from a publisher. The errors are noise.

[kovidgoyal]

They aren't noise, they are warnings about CSS properties that are not standard and that therefore might not work everywhere.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by vr8ce

I do remember that, but it's irrelevant here — Calibre is an ebook editor. Ebooks are the only context for this CSS. And these directives came from a publisher. The errors are noise.

They are WARNINGS, not noise.
There are lots of older devices that do have (improper) issues with directives that are supposed to be ignored if unknown
RMSDK is famous for ignoring whole stylesheets because it found a CSS entry it did not know how to deal with

Your job is to know what WARNING YOU can allow to remain

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by vr8ce

I do remember that, but it's irrelevant here — Calibre is an ebook editor. Ebooks are the only context for this CSS. And these directives came from a publisher. The errors are noise.

Perhaps you might to tell Hitch that anything in an ebook is okay because it came from a publisher. Everyone needs a good laugh. Ghod knows, I've edited enough ebooks to find your faith in publishers risible. Touching and childlike but risible nonetheless.

To belabour the point, I have never seen a standard published by Amazon for their CSS content. So the only standard for ebooks and CSS we have to work with are the CSS standards. By those standards, the only item you mentioned that is a standard item is hyphens and that only if you are generating an epub3 book using CSS3. Any of the other directives you mentioned are vendor extensions and not part of the CSS standards.

So they can and should generate a warning. You can use them but don't depend on them to work as you hope since most renderers will disregard them at best. I've seen renderers that did not fail gracefully on finding an unknown directive so the entire stylesheet was dumped.

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by vr8ce

Why does "Check book" complain about the various CSS "hyphens" directives (hyphens, -epub-hyphens, -webkit-hyphens, etc.)? [...] Just about any epub guide that I've seen tells you to use them.

May I ask which guides said this?

[deback]

You can delete all those lines by adding them to the Preferences under Conversion -> Common Options -> Transform Styles. Enter the property name (without the ending semi-colon), choose "If any value," and then choose "Remove the property." Then, after you convert the file, those properties will be gone.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Perhaps you might to tell Hitch that anything in an ebook is okay because it came from a publisher. Everyone needs a good laugh. Ghod knows, I've edited enough ebooks to find your faith in publishers risible. Touching and childlike but risible nonetheless.

I remember buying a series of three books and finding out that none of them worked with ADE. The CSS had errors that prevented them from working. Because I was able to strip the DRM, I was able to fix the errors and the eBooks became readable. I didn't have to bother to get my money back.