Then why are we creating HTML anyway?
Who "we" are and "why *we* are creating HTML" is something which PG volunteers and the PG community in general do not agree-upon which in turn leads to PG HTML *NOT* being universally a pleasant and readable experience in our user community. Here's why *I* write HTML -- as opposed to say txt70: Because it allows me to much better preserve and represent what I believe to be the original intent of the author and/or publisher. It allows images to be included. It allows decorative rules to be included -- in those cases where I decide that decorative rules really were an important part of the original book design. It allows me to choose from the approx. 60,000 glyphs of the Unicode set -- where truly needed. It allow me -- with great caution -- to use a few of the many 1000s of tools written to support the creation of HTML. It allows me to target approx. 90% of the PG user base with ONE file format -- *IF* I know what I am doing when I write to that file format. It allows me to properly represent italic and bold. It allows me to properly represent footnotes. It allows my work to be read on a variety of machines, from tiny to huge displays, in either portrait or landscape or even in HDTV widescreen mode. It allows me to create invocative title pages that accurately document where this work is derived from. It allows me to create usable Tables of Contents with hotlinks. It allows me to create invocative Chapter Titles, and subtitles. It allows me to create usable indented quotation blocks. It allows me (with some difficulty) to create readable poetry. It allows me to read PG books on my personal eBook Reader with enough invocative details of "real paper books" that I become immersed in my reading and forget that I am "just" seeing little bits of bicolored plastic floating in a liquid electrostatically charged by a CPU to create a paper-like display -- and I feel just like I really am reading a paper document -- at least until I am jerked back into reality by some bit of random ugliness created by a PG HTML "author" who didn't know what they were doing! (heavy sigh) It allows me, and other PG users, to frequently just download an HTML, EPUB, or MOBI file to our personal machine, often without even having to go through an intermediary PC or other gate-keeper device, maybe even while sitting in an airline terminal, open that file, and start reading, and EVERYTHING JUST MAGICALLY WORKS WITHOUT HAVING TO MUCK WITH IT! I don't HAVE to run an unwrapper program on each file. I don't HAVE to run a customize-to-my-machine program on each file, etc. IT JUST WORKS! [tm] and IT WORKS *MY* WAY! [tm] And *that* is about ALL the reasons *I* use HTML. One common problem I believe is that some people try to accomplish *way too much* using HTML -- and in the process muck things up for many PG users. One other "good" reason why "we" use HTML, I believe, is that many PG volunteers think [for better of for worse] that learning HTML is a good thing to add to their personal resume, because that knowledge set, for better or worse, once learned, can be applied other places to other jobs. As opposed, for example, to having to learn some PG-proprietary file format which would be simply time and energy flushed down the drain. Now having said that, "PG HTML" is actually something quite different than "Website HTML" so "beware, there be dragons" ....