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.
I think this forum and others have warned against using Calibre for serious purposes. Not sure what you are trying to do.
people with no programming experience aren't doing because they're too lazy to.
They are certainly not lazy because they are expending tremendous time and effort to complexify their offerings. Again, this is baroque-ification.
Rather that is PG's charter! "Write Once Read Everywhere." But we are not allowed to do this. Why?
Because it's impossible.
Nonsense. One can find the occasional submission that seems to understand the issues and "gets it right." You can also find people who know so little about HTML that they get it right. Here's the CSS from a recent book that "works" : <style type="text/css"> p { text-indent:1.5em; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0; } p.first { text-indent:0; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0; } div.bq { margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; } div.bq p { margin-left:10%; margin-right:10%; } body { margin: 10% 10%; text-align: justify; } h1 { text-align:center; font-weight:normal; margin-top:2em; margin-bottom: 1em; font-size:1.2em; } hr.pb { border:none; border-bottom:1px solid silver; margin-top:50px; margin-bottom:50px; } hr.tb { border:none; margin-top: 1.5em; } div.figure { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; } p.caption { margin: 1em auto; text-indent: 0; width:70%; } </style> -- where epubmaker apparently "autorepairs" the margin settings. But the point is, one can look at the CSS and the markup, and say "well this person doesn't seem to be bending over backwards to do something goofy" and then one looks at the book, and guess what: It works.