(I gave a link to one of my own ePubs for review in a previous post in response to your review. I hope you will still have a look at it to indicate problems with it.)
Sorry, I can't find the link, can you please send it again.
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.]
And it ends up making PG look foolish, and further, then others simply take the PG code, strip out most or all of that "gratuitous" HTML formatting optimized for large displays, retaining (if you are lucky) <i> and <b>, and redistribute that reduced formatting effort from other locations having removed the PG name.
Most PG copycats don't bother at all with the HTML versions, and start with the text versions directly....
Good as a stop-gap measure, I do have such ePubs for all my submissions waiting for the great day. (But am aware of the maintenance issues this introduces, the main reason why it is not in
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. place.) The "maintenance issues" is not a reasonable argument, given that PG is happy to send out books year after year which are seriously broken, without fixing them.