Quote:
Originally Posted by DawnFalcon
Um, orwell, ePub's XHTML. There's not a massive amount of difference to chose from between the formats, you realise? Yes, the ePub renderers on devices need improving, but that doesn't reflect on the standards specification itself!
What you're talking about with fonts and CSS is perfectly possible for ePub - and the more advanced renderers such as Bookworm do that and more (MathML, embedded video, etc.)
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Yes I understand that, and you're right the problem is primarily the renderers at the moment. But clearly there is a major problem if the format has all that capability, and the renderers fail to use it or worse, block the capability (or provide no access to use it).
The similarity of the formats is one thing, and I firmly believe ePub has potential to become an excellent format, but at the moment it is, for my reading purposes, somewhere between annoying and useless. This is primarily down to the capability I am used to with reading FB2. Anyone who has not used FB2 will not miss the capability, hence ePub probably seems good. But for me ePub, and Mobi, are both a step backwards in terms of the flexibility and ease with which I can read FB2 format books.
The one area where that is not true is with linking, as I have not found a way to follow links when reading FB2 books. But I work around this by placing footnotes and so on near the marked text when I create the book. I think, to be honest, this is another renderer issue as the format seems to support links, so it could be placed in the same class as most of the current ePub issues.
FB2 was never going to be a viable choice - it was not developed by the movers and shakers with a stake in the business end of eBooks (such as Adobe) and I guess in many ways it's also getting old now (10+ years or so?).
I am extremely biased - I don't think I've ever hidden that fact - as FB2 was my first real eBook format and as such I probably have sentimental as well as practical reasons to love it. But love it, I do, and I'm yet to find a good reason to move away from it - every other format is easily convertible to FB2, so perhaps in the end the "winning" format is somewhat irrelevant so long as the tools remain to allow users to read any format they wish? The ultimate in flexibility...
