On 2012-10-09 16:03, James Adcock wrote:>
Sorry, I can't find the link, can you please send it again.
http://www.gutenberg.ph/previews/blumentritt/EthnographiePhilippinen.epub,
Yes, I want to support all readers, but don't believe the current process is good enough for it. If you produce one HTML to serve both desktop and mobile devices, you will do a disservice to both. They are just too far apart to have something that really works nice. Each platform needs mutually exclusive tweaks. epubmaker is just not good enough at this yet. (May I remind you of the discussions around Apps made for 10", 7" and 4" devices.)
If it's just "tweaks" then perhaps a conditional compilation approach such as @media is the way to go [but NOT PG's "@media handheld" which is an exactly backwards anti-standard.]
That might work, I think you can get quite some results by tweaking CSS alone (which is what I do mainly). Once it boils down to a need to redesign tables, it gets more complicated. Note that of course the ePub generation also requires some metadata, and things as OPF, NCX, and other stuff to be generated, and places some limitations on the XHTML being used.
So again, because some submitters submit HTML which only works on large machines, what happens is that the submitters *who do* write code which works on all machines have THEIR "beautiful and sincere" efforts thrown away because some submitters selfishly only want to support some machines, and most ebook readers never see these good efforts, because the "copycat distributors" have to now assume the least-common-denominator "txt" format. Where "copycat" includes Amazon, and Apple, and feedbooks, and ... I don't think PG's position is that we oppose "copycats" -- we are trying to get these books read and distributed as widely as possible. What we would like is to have the PG name retained so that PG can at least get credit for the good work, and the very hard work, being done -- and that only happens if the formatting actually works. If the formatting doesn't work, then the PG name and credit WILL be removed.
I agree fully with the second half of this paragraph. Jeroen.