I can guarantee that CSS file is in the PG directory. I can't guarantee that Joe Sixpack will download that when he grabs the HTML file.
Agreed. If he wants a richer reading experience, he should grab the CSS. Pretty simple overall. If the reader wants to grab 200 etexts, its easier to let them know they need one .css file, than 200 identical css stanzas. I understand your needs, but you're un-CSS-ifying CSS.
The CSS adds to the size of the etext, and on some level that feels ... wrong. I can't explain why, it just does. However, whenever PG posts a new e-text, they add a great big header and footer to the document for legal reasons. That thing absolutely dwarfs the CSS style header is size, so I don't feel AS badly as I might otherwise.
The PG header is considered "content", while CSS is considered "presentation". Again, I understand where you're coming from here, I just don't personally agree with it. I'm more of a purist, in the strictest sense of the word. ;)
If you put visible page breaks into an HTML document, the user is going to expect that document to print to his printer at exactly those page breaks. Good luck.
This is why 'media="print"' exists in a CSS declaration. See here for more: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/media.html
Also, page breaks would only make sense if you broke them into "visual" chunks. By that, I mean sizes that fit into one screen at a time -- no scrolling. However, if the user has a different resolution than you, it ain't gonna work. If he changes the font size, it ain't gonna work.
You can't translate a book into something read in a web browser, and retain the same functionality. The whole point of a scrollbar is to remove that constraint. Though I agree, unnessarily-long webpages (scrolling down for hundreds of pages) are a pain, but the alternative is much more painful.
The page numbers are not meant to give you visual indication of page breaks as much as contextual information regarding the original source... which some people find very important and as it's fairly easy for me to include that information without disturbing the other readers, I do.
Right. Your page numbers don't correlate to anything, except an "Oh thats neat!" kind of feeling as you imagine what it would be like to be reading page 423 in the printed (dead-tree) version of that particular work. Page 423 in your numbering scheme is not the 423'd page as seen in my browser.
PS None of this is an argument for my CSS based HTML over TEI-Lite. I would LOVE if we have TEI-Lite capabilities right now... But we don't.
I'm still gathering info and doing research on all of the alternatives presented thus far. TEI is one of the datapoints in my research. David A. Desrosiers desrod@gnu-designs.com http://gnu-designs.com