Quoting James Adcock <jimad@msn.com>:
OK, but this demonstrates, once again, the on-going conflict (with Jeroen's being one common point of view)
Jeroen says basically "I want to write HTML for large desktop computer displays, not HTML for EPUB or MOBI on small displays. In fact, *I* want to pick and choose which customers PG gets to support with my efforts. By doing this I can format more conveniently and attractively by optimizing for the large desktop computer displays."
I think, in this you misrepresent what I said. I prepare my HTML for what was historically the only target display: a (more-or-less) large landscape monitor connected to a desktop computer. Back in 2009, I added an alternative to that: ePub aimed at small portrait screens on mobile devices. I upgraded my tooling, and now generate both. PG still only accepts the HTML, and thinks it can generate the ePub itself from that HTML. (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.) 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.)
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....
PG Customers want to read in EPUB and MOBI. HTML which is intentionally -- as Jeroen's example describes -- written for large desktop displays will not run correctly on EPUB and MOBI devices. The current PG approach does not resolve this dilemma. PG says formatters are supposed to be submitting HTML that is "write once read everywhere," but in practice PG doesn't enforce that requirement.
There are many ways to resolve this problem.
One would be to actually enforce the requirement that the HTML be "write once read everywhere."
One would be to allow volunteers to directly submit EPUB, and not require that the EPUB and MOBI be derived from HTML.
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 place.)
One would be to allow volunteers to submit two versions of HTML, one optimized for the big desktop displays, and another for the small EPUB and MOBI displays.
Would not resolve the maintenance issue, and would decrease the quality of the generated ePubs agains what is possible in the first option.
Another would be to allow submitters at submission time to say "This HTML is designed only to work on large desktop displays." Then either you take an approach where PG simply doesn't try to generate the EPUB or the MOBI, or you take the approach where PG ignores the HTML and tries instead to generated EPUB and MOBI directly from the submitted txt files. But then in either case, I think you will find the problem again that all that happens is that other volunteers step up to the bat, rework the HTML to work on the small EPUB and MOBI displays, take out the PG name, and distribute the book via other forums. And then PG customers are left searching around the web to find a copy of the "PG" book which actually works on their EPUB or MOBI devices.
This issue is basically a licensing issue. Since PG requires the complete removal of its name, we loose a lot of credit here. I would require the opposite (where legally possible given that most of our work isn't covered by copyright), and use the CC-BY license instead.
In which case, again, why not simply allow these "fixed" versions for EPUB and MOBI be distributed via PG in the first place ???
As indicated, the maintenance nightmare of having to fix issues in multiple versions of the same text. Jeroen.