keith said:

Please excuse if this seems OT, but we are in general talking about creating ebooks.

more on the table-of-contents? _more?_ really? it's not "off-topic", but it's a big waste of time...

If I understand you correctly, the NCX is being deprecated/susperceded for the HTML 5 <nav>-tag.

oh no. now you're off lost in the swamp of .ncx? no wonder you're bogged down and wasting time.

Now, I can see the elegance of the approach, but isn't this going to cause a big mess when authoring an ebook and cause older EPUB not to function properly.

keith, i wrote a reply to you a month or two ago, when we were talking about .epub. i held it back, because i thought it was probably _too_ blistering, but in retrospect, i darn well should have posted it. because you still do not seem to realize that i.d.p.f. uses .epub for the _purpose_ of "causing a big mess". the corporate dinosaurs that compose the i.d.p.f. are doing whatever they can to retard a movement toward electronic-books, because they realize it will kill them. they _want_ e-books to fail. or at least to slow down. so they're constantly mucking stuff around, _hoping_ that they can confuse people enough, and make the e-book experience so painful, that we will "give up" the revolution, and let them continue to rob us blind. don't fall in their trap.

How should I deveolp a new ebook. 1) still use a NCX 2) just use the HTML5 <nav>-tag 3) use both methods

you forgot choice 4 -- throw out the corrupt bastards, and use an easy-to-author e-book format that works.

This may seem as a trivial question, yet is important expect an ebook to work with different ereaders or develop a tool.

the corporate dinosaurs don't want e-books to work. they certainly do not want anyone to "develop a tool". that's why they keep changing the rules of the game. the only way to win is to overturn their little chess-set. even as it is, they've managed to put blinders on us. electronic-books used to _enthrall_ people, because the opportunities that are created seemed _endless_. remember when we used to let our imaginations roam, and we thought of wonderful things e-books could do? now we actually _have_ much of the infrastructure that we need to make many of those dreams come true -- such as handheld devices which are very powerful, and widespread and persistent wireless access to the internet -- but are we acting to instantiate those dreams in reality? well, no, we're not, because we're bogged down in useless bullshit like figuring out how to make a table of contents... why did someone constrain our vision? (the answer, like always, has to do with money.) and why did we allow that? if we do not act, we are acted upon. it's time for us to act.

Otherwise there will ebooks to redo and redo!

until you give up. or get smart. which one will it be? -bowerbird