Lee Passey wrote:
On Wed, December 14, 2011 7:00 am, Paul Flo Williams wrote:
Lee Passey wrote:
[snipped discussion of "tag soup"]
That's an extraordinarily verbose way of agreeing with me :-)
Verbosity is only one of my many faults ;-). The point I was trying to make, perhaps inartfully, is that the term "tag soup" covers a multiple of sins.
And then you made a taxonomy of them, compounding the sin :-)
I don't know the tolerance Kindlegen has for these different types of tag soup, but from a practical perspective, I would think you should limit yourself to class 3 tag soup as Kindlegen input. So when you say "downgrade it to an HTML 3.2 tag soup," I simply wanted to caution that it's okay to downgrade to class 3 tag soup, but probably not class 2, and certainly not class 1.
Granted. I'm processing XML throughout, else I'd be writing too many custom tools.
The default display mode for <div> is block, and the default display mode for <span> is inline. But in your example you have changed the display mode for <span class="line"> to block. Why not just use <div> in the first place, as its default presentation is exactly what you wanted?
OK, I'll have to shortcut this with a mea culpa: I both over- and under-thought my example. I spent a lot of time marking up a book where many paragraphs contained quoted verses or couplets, and I went backwards and forwards with thoughts of "it looks like two paragraphs, so should I mark it up as such, or should I mark it up as the single paragraph (thought) that it really is, and leave presentation for later?" When going with the latter, I had to use <span> because paragraphs can't contain other divisions of text. I then thought I'd based my example on the markup in the book, but did a poor job. The point about selecting elements to transform by class instead of element name, as we might do with microformats, got lost in the noise.
My fundamental rule is don't do anything that doesn't need to be done (even if it would be fun to do). But I can definitely envision that over time a generic Kindlegen preprocessor might elbow out Kindlegen itself.
Two years ago, I think you'd be right. With KF8 in the wings, I can't say I'm willing to do any more than provide crutches for the vocabulary I've chosen to use for markup.