Re: ebook reader - image scaling ?

On 5/31/2024 4:07 AM, R.Wieser wrote:

"basic HTML" ?   Never heard of that.
 

    HTML is official and defined. There are versions, but it's
defined. Part of the original intention was to make it available
and relatively easy to use. So interpreters are designed to make
the best of what they get. If you make a syntax error in CSS
then the whole thing wil fail from that point on. The parser just says
"fuck this!" at the first irregularity. With HTML the browser will try
to display as best it can.

FYI, the html variant used in epub's is called XHTML (as I found yesterday).
Its a bit more strict than the HTML implemented in webbrowsers. Including
that *all* arguments to attributes need to be in double-quotes, regardless
of if they are values or not.
 

   I wasn't familiar with XHTML. Wikipedia says it's actually a variant
of XML rather than HTML. And there have been numerous versions.
As near as I can tell, all this is a general trend toward developing
standards that are extremely rigid: easy for automating software but
hard for hand-coders. Wikipedia says the latest XHTML, v. 5, is designed
for use with web apps; the developers viewed XHTML 2 as "too
document oriented". (v. 2 apparently went to v. 5.)
   This looks like a rehashing of the XML fad and then the JSON fad:
Very complicated ways of storing data that only a machine could love.
It's faddish because the people using it are not actually working
with it directly. They're using WYSIWYG tools where they can just plug
in copy, images, etc, and the software will write the code.
   So I guess you'd need to figure out what version of XHTML you have
and then get the docs for it. I'd look myself if I were curious, but to
my mind life's too short for XML, XHTML and JSON. And too short for
ebooks, too, for that matter. :) Though I actually wrote a simple VBS
JSON parser in order to use REST API map functions from Google and
Bing. JSON seemed less distasteful than XML, and it wastes a lot less
bytes in its rigidity.

For instance, I
can't get a "<hr/>" to display.

   Isn't that "<hr />" ? This is crazy stuff. Heavy quoting. Case sensitive.
Case sensitivity is another thing that's good for machines but not for
human readability. With XHTML it seems to mean the same thing it means in C++
and javascript: Virtually all keywords and variables will be lowercase, making
the code flow harder to read, but occasional uppercase elements are thrown
in to keep you on your toes.