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Your ePub Is fine

andreklein.net

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Re: Your ePub Is fine

#111

Post by pluralmonad »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #54

BTW for those who are looking for a device, the PineNote exists: https://pine64.org/devices/pinenote/ More expensive and less out-of-the-box software, but straight to the point on device ownership/what kind of software you can run, fewer strings attached. [EDIT] Great experience blogs on the PineNote https://shom.dev/posts/20250308_pinenote-day-one/ https://shom.dev/posts/20250406_a-pinenote-only-5-day-weeken...

Thanks for this call out. I have not checked on Pine devices much since a disappointing early Pinebook.

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#112

Post by gnatolf »

jwrallie wrote: post #11

> When I started out, I dreaded the moment when I hit the validate button on my finished book after months of work, because it would always find something to cry about. I remembered one particular master student on the verge of tears trying to compile his LaTeX thesis draft, he took the “write and think about formatting later” too literally and was trying to compile it for the first time very close to the deadline.

Which, to be fair, overall probably still saved quite some time. The compile times alone would've meant they wasted so much more time by repeated earlier checks.

Whether a looming deadline changed the perception about that, we don't know ;-P

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#113

Post by basch »

radley wrote: post #99
dghlsakjg wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was an average-joe high school student back then. People hated flash. Even non techies.

> People hated flash. Even non techies. Billions of people enjoyed using Flash for games, video, music, and animated entertainment.

or they enjoyed the games despite flash.

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#114

Post by ndiddy »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #102
ndiddy wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Could you maybe make your point more concrete? I hadn't heard of the Pinenote before looking at your comment, so I looked at the site and saw some things that made it seem unfit for purpose as an ereader. I made my comment because I was interested in hearing your impressions if you were using it as a daily driver. > The point is to buy hardware that is built for you to freely modify and fully own, from the start. P…

> I hadn't heard of the Pinenote before looking at your comment, so I looked at the site and saw some things that made it seem unfit for purpose as an ereader. I made my comment because I was interested in hearing your impressions if you were using it as a daily driver. I updated my original comment to include some more personal blogs with first-hand accounts. They're not mine but worth linking to for others! I haven…

Thanks, I'll look at those blog posts.

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#115

Post by hardwaresofton »

pluralmonad wrote: post #111
hardwaresofton wrote: post #54

BTW for those who are looking for a device, the PineNote exists: https://pine64.org/devices/pinenote/ More expensive and less out-of-the-box software, but straight to the point on device ownership/what kind of software you can run, fewer strings attached. [EDIT] Great experience blogs on the PineNote https://shom.dev/posts/20250308_pinenote-day-one/ https://shom.dev/posts/20250406_a-pinenote-only-5-day-weeken...

Thanks for this call out. I have not checked on Pine devices much since a disappointing early Pinebook.

No worries, and thanks for your service -- people buying possibly-disappointing early devices definitely enables the newer devices to exist :)

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#116

Post by dghlsakjg »

radley wrote: post #99
dghlsakjg wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was an average-joe high school student back then. People hated flash. Even non techies.

> People hated flash. Even non techies. Billions of people enjoyed using Flash for games, video, music, and animated entertainment.

Enjoying a game, video, or music is different than enjoying the underlying means of delivery.

Do people love Javascript and HTML5, or do they like streaming entertainment?

Do gamers love Unity, or do they love playing fun games, some of which are made with Unity?

I played games on every Windows from 3.1 and up (and MS-DOS before that), but I'm not pining for the days of Windows ME despite how much fun I had on that machine.

People used Internet Explorer to run all their Flash entertainment, but nobody is arguing that IE was loved even though it was part of the flash stack for a huge majority of users.

Notably, Flash is dead, and no one is arguing that we bring it back.

If I never have to sit through a flash loading bar gating an HTML website with a completely unnecessary splash page, you won't find me mourning. (yung'uns: this was a thing. If you wanted to go see a website sometimes you had to sit for a while so a dumb flash animation would show and you could click through to the actual HTML content. Jobs did you a favour)

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#117

Post by mannyv »

"Epubcheck does basic CSS checking of course, but it can’t validate CSS against a renderer which is fundamentally broken!"

According to the author, Kobo uses CSS from 2013. A quick check with an AI says RMSDK supports CSS 2.1 and parts of 3.

So it's not that the renderer is broken, it's that he believed that epubcheck actually checks against devices and the versions of CSS that those devices support.

This is exactly the issue with test tools: the test tool tests to a spec, but the platform is the gold standard. If you don't like it tough shit.

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#118

Post by pmarreck »

acdha wrote: post #20

Adobe has always been like this, too. They squandered an enormous marketshare with Flash because the alternative would've been spending a couple million on QA and they managed to unite all of the browser manufacturers in agreement that the web was better off without such an unreliable partner. I shipped a couple of things on Flash back in the day but it was staggeringly bad software — random crashes, various heisenbu…

Flash was better back when it was called VideoWorks. ;)

Notably, there was also a MusicWorks. Both Mac-only. But like EARLY Mac-only.

/dates me

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#119

Post by dghlsakjg »

dpark wrote: post #96
dghlsakjg wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was an average-joe high school student back then. People hated flash. Even non techies.

What’s “back then” to you? Flash grew up in the time of dial up when you could still get AOL install discs with 100 free hours in your typical grocery store PC magazine. I don’t recall people hating Flash a lot until later when it wasn’t a technical necessity anymore.

The first computer I remember using was a Compaq Portable with a green screen and DOS that my dad was allowed to bring home on weekends. I vividly remember going to Circuit City as a family to buy our first windows 3.1 machine.

Flash was very cool, at first, then it got used for WAY too much stuff that had no graceful degradation so you were stuck waiting a few minutes for an animation to load so you could see the content stuck behind flash.

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#120

Post by kortilla »

radley wrote: post #99
dghlsakjg wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was an average-joe high school student back then. People hated flash. Even non techies.

> People hated flash. Even non techies. Billions of people enjoyed using Flash for games, video, music, and animated entertainment.

Doesn’t pass the smell test. “Billions” is >2 billion. There weren’t that many people online when iPhone came out with its famous flash ban. https://ourworldindata.org/internet
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