07-26-2012, 09:03 PM | #46 | |
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http://www.webmonkey.com/2012/07/html-groups-part-ways/ Last edited by JSWolf; 07-26-2012 at 09:05 PM. |
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07-27-2012, 04:17 AM | #47 | |
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I.e. the IDPF won't have to wait until the HTML 5 standard is finalized; they can cherry-pick the new features that they'd like to be supported by ereaders using the HTML 5 specs as guidelines. Both Amazon and Apple already followed a similar approach. |
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07-27-2012, 04:34 PM | #48 | |
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07-27-2012, 07:37 PM | #49 |
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07-28-2012, 04:21 PM | #50 |
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I think that there is a fundamental problem here: many (major) players think about eBooks as "small web sites in a container". Hence, they have proposed web technologies (XHTML and HTML5) as the technological core of the EPUB format.
And I think this way of reasoning is simply wrong, and it generates very bad habits, like people not using the tags properly, i.e. not marking semantically the content of the eBooks, but just "drawing" them in the same way CSS are abused for web sites. |
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07-28-2012, 08:48 PM | #51 |
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Very interesting comment. Can you give some examples to illustrate how tags and CSS are abused?
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07-29-2012, 06:26 AM | #52 |
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Tags are abused when one uses them to obtain a presentational effect, instead of using them to "annotate" their content.
Many CSS files you get on the web are redundant in many ways, for example they contain elements and subelements declaring the same styles or several classes (different names) with the same set of instructions. I think that one of the major benefits of eBooks is that (potentially) the reader-user might provide "her own CSS" (*) and enjoy the book according to her preferences. (BTW, this was also the original idea behind the HTML.) Unfortunately, many publishers just want to "transpose" a paper edition into digital format, trying to reproduce it exactly. This leads, in many cases, to styling abuses. For example, I have seen a commercial EPUB of a novel (text-only) with an associated CSS with 400+ CSS declarations. These could have been reduced to less than 30 without impacting the "functionality" of the eBook. To be fair, there are also cases where an essential part of the book consists in its typographical features, but then one might want to think about the opportunity of opting for other formats (PDF?). (*) of course this is impossible to achieve in general, unless everyone agrees on using a common styling CSS structure. But, at least, if a CSS inside an EPUB is written with some logic, the user is able to edit it to tweak the appearance of the eBook. (I had to do this for several eBooks.) Last edited by AlPe; 07-29-2012 at 06:30 AM. Reason: it -> them in the first sentence |
07-29-2012, 09:33 AM | #53 |
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An example would be using <i> instead of <em>, for example. The <i> tag is "presentational" - it will always display text in italics. The <em> tag is semantic - it describes the desired effect - to emphasise the text - but leaves it up to the rendering engine to decide how to do that.
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07-29-2012, 01:34 PM | #54 | |
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Basically, replace markup as directed, ideally with some smarts. Not "automated", but faster and easier than manual editing in a text editor. |
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07-30-2012, 02:51 PM | #55 |
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For <i></i> and <em></em>, I tend to do S&R, looking for i> and em> and then have it replace the appropriate one with the other option.
It does it one at a time, but it only takes me no more than 15mins for a full-size novel. |
07-30-2012, 07:26 PM | #56 |
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If <em></em> is for emphasizing text, then how do you indicate whether you want to emphasize with italics or bold?
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07-30-2012, 09:50 PM | #57 | |
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07-31-2012, 01:20 AM | #58 |
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07-31-2012, 03:40 AM | #59 |
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07-31-2012, 04:33 AM | #60 | |
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The "how" is the CSS job. |
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