On Tue, December 13, 2011 12:52 pm, Jim Adcock wrote:
James >I've been using Sigil to make my EPUBs and I'm pretty happy with it.
I've looked at the code Sigil has generated in the past and I don't remember being overwhelmingly happy with it. One characteristic I would want in the epub editor is that it not change code that I haven't asked it to edit.
My dissatisfaction with Sigil is the primary reason I started working on ePubEditor. There is a bias both at the W3C HTML working group and the ePub working group to force all styling into style sheets. Academically I can't fault this approach, but practically there are any number of older User Agents (and Kindle/MobiPocket falls into this category) that simply do not do CSS well. I've done a lot of experimentation with using CSS programmatically, and I can say that it is harder than in looks. I understand why these User Agents don't satisfy all the requirements.. My approach to HTML in e-books is to try and make a book look good without using styles and without abusing HTML tags. This is how the e-book will look in the least-capable User Agents. I then add styles as an external style sheet that will make the e-book look really sharp /in my opinion/. Believe it or not, I do not believe that my opinion is the only one that counts. By using an external style sheet I hopefully make it easy for anyone to substitute their opinion for mine. I find it hard to remember the specific issues, but Sigil makes it hard for me to use the approach I have found best. On Tue, December 13, 2011 6:38 am, Jim Adcock wrote:
My claim is that it is generally really not necessary to exercise all the excesses of HTML nor all the shortcomings in the ereaders in order to create high-quality transcriptions of most of the books that are out there. I think the real problem is the tendency of all of us to try to "prove" we are uber-geeks leads many to try to out-geek all the others when it comes to the complexity of the HTML code being submitted.
This is very perceptive, and I think explains the drawback of Sigil. It is designed specifically to satisfy the most rigid, strict, and current ePub specification. Thus, some of the things it does makes it inconvenient when you're dealing with some of the less-capable User Agents. I think it was Einstein who said, "make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler." BowerBird's s.m.l. is an example of making things simpler than possible; it is unable to capture the required complexity, and cannot be extended if more complex structures are encountered. Sigil's XHTML is an example of not simplifying enough.