On Sun, Oct 7, 2012 at 10:21 AM, James Adcock <jimad@msn.com> wrote:
Again, I claim it IS "vanity" when people try to "over-engineer" a simple problem.
And I claim it's vanity to think your personal opinion needs expressing even when it gives needless offense to people you need to work with.
Guess what, if you do check it out, you will see that it fails, and then maybe you will choose to fix it.
How? I'm producing HTML from a script that's taking an hour to convert for Kindle in Calibre and produces a suboptimal table of contents, and I couldn't find a single page out there that would tell me how to write better HTML for these purposes. Writing portable code is always a pain in the ass that involves knowing subtle bugs and issues on a variety of systems, and you're implying that something that professional programmers frequently punt on (I believe my favorite website has hit the "forget about IE 5" point) is something that people with no programming experience aren't doing because they're too lazy to.
Rather that is PG's charter! "Write Once Read Everywhere." But we are not allowed to do this. Why?
Because it's impossible. There is probably not a single person in the world that knows the issues of every web-browser in use as well as the issues of all the ebook readers, particularly once you add our local ebook generators in the equation. The Whitewashers want to avoid everyone and their brother offering tweaks for the HTML so that we work around a bug for IE 4 on Solaris and break the Sony Reader (admittedly a more minor platform) or vice versa, through an endless cycle of changes. -- Kie ekzistas vivo, ekzistas espero.