I was once like you, thinking like "It's the web! I know this!" Turns out, no...actually you don't. I've been soaking in this for a couple weeks, trying to rid my life of the last few Word documents that I use frequently and haven't converted.
Writing HTML to mimic print layout is a bit creaky, but it's trivial compared to the kinds of shenanigans that EPUB often requires.
Despite what you might tell yourself, reader applications are not web browsers, and come with their own set of idiosyncrasies and corner cases, and will gladly barf all over your HTML or (worse) sit still and refuse to move no matter how much you cajole them.
If web standards sometimes make you feel like ants trying to reach the top of a hill with bits of grain, EPUB might as well be rolling Sisyphus' boulder.
"It is not the web, it's the web as rendered by a schizophrenic, half crazed hamster in a wheel"
I was once like you, thinking like "It's the web! I know this!" Turns out, no...actually you don't. I've been soaking in this for a couple weeks, trying to rid my life of the last few Word documents that I use frequently and haven't converted.
Writing HTML to mimic print layout is a bit creaky, but it's trivial compared to the kinds of shenanigans that EPUB often requires.
Despite what you might tell yourself, reader applications are not web browsers, and come with their own set of idiosyncrasies and corner cases, and will gladly barf all over your HTML or (worse) sit still and refuse to move no matter how much you cajole them.
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/34d4f471-2bf6-4e55-ba95-1419f20...
If web standards sometimes make you feel like ants trying to reach the top of a hill with bits of grain, EPUB might as well be rolling Sisyphus' boulder.
"It is not the web, it's the web as rendered by a schizophrenic, half crazed hamster in a wheel"
-John Siracusa