Well, hello, that’s really a poor excuse. What mobile device *isn’t* resource-limited?

And listen, I use ADE on a frikkin *1.8GHz* desktop CPU and it’s a horrible, rotten, full-of-friction experience. What? Now even *GHz*-level speeds are weak?

MS actually submitted every thing the changed in IE to the standard body and, you have a lot of examples of standards or standard addons that move though the motions of being certifed and never actually gain multi vendor support, theres a lot more to the practical world of compatability then getting the right stamps on your specifications.

I agree that EPUB hasn’t yet been implemented properly by many vendors (I exclude Adobe from this – more below). But one of the key points of EPUB is to provide a high degree of flexibility to implementors to render differently based on device constraints. I don’t want to make excuses for a vendor that, say, doesn’t handle the CSS cascade at all, but EPUB is about structured content not visual fidelity. Since in some circumstances (read out loud) the rendition might not even be visual! I do agree we need more validation of content and implementation (after all Adobe developed and open sources the EPUB validator); but even with improved compliance in the future, trying to recreate what csszengarden did in EPUB would be to miss the point of what EPUB is all about. And anyway the CSS subset defined in EPUB is about entity-level styling, not geometric (page level) layout. As I said earlier in this comment thread: if you want to achieve a particular page layout, there’s a perfectly good open standard for this: PDF, and all of Adobe’s eBook solutions support both PDF and EPUB.

As far as EPUB not doing anything other formats don’t do – the proprietary reflow-oriented eBook formats I’m aware of do not support embedded font subsets, scalable vector graphics, or CSS styling. Most of them don’t have structured table of contents support and other key features. If you are pessimistic about EPUB, then what eBook format(s) do you feel will succeed and why?

Re: the complexity of EPUB. Yeah, I wish it was simpler too. A bit of this is historical – there were things about the preexisting OEBPS version that, in the opinion of most of the WG in the last cycle, made sense to retain for compatibility and this led to some overlap (e.g. between spine and TOC, between XHTML & DTBook options). Yet, embedded fonts and SVG are inherently complex, Overall. I feel the complexity of EPUB is within what should be expected for an XML-based format delivering the functionality it has.

As far as Adobe taking an “embrace and redefine” road, and not “properly” implementing EPUB,I think the facts speak for themselves. Adobe has been an active IDPF WG participant, and the compatibility of our rendering engine and authoring tools compare very well with other implementations. As I mentioned we ourselves initially developed the EPUB validator that is now an open source project being developed and used by many others. Adobe did implement two extensions to EPUB; these were done compatibly & properly (e.g. not in IDPF namespace). They were extensions only because the IDPF WG had a full plate and chose not to expand its charter to work on them during the work that led to the most recent standard version in late 2007. IMO this was a sound decision since otherwise a delay would have resulted. One of these two extensions (obfuscating embedded font subsets) has already been adopted by IDPF via a tech note; the other (page-level templates, enabling things like headers & footers) has been fully documented by Adobe and the subject of some IDPF WG discussion. Since AAP already urged IDPF to enhance the base EPUB standard in this area, I fully expect some mechanism for page templates to be adopted officially, and that Adobe will be compatible with it.

Bottom line: if you honestly think Adobe has not properly implemented EPUB, please post or send me file(s) demonstrating this. I’m not saying we’re perfect, and EPUB is still a relatively new standard, and thus so is our implementation. But to complain without any concrete examples is just talking out of your hat.

In order to create what csszengarden did you would probably need your very own epub reader, since you got no chance of getting consistence witht the state the current readers are in if you actually try to do anything advanced with epub.

I still maintain that epub as anything but yet another export format automatic tools might support is a naive ivory tower project, atleast 10 year in the future and with the probablity that it can remain 10 years ahead of us for decades.

I’m the first to admit that Adobe Digital Edition’s underlying rendering engine will benefit from improvements in typographic capabilities. We are walking a fine line here since that engine also is employed in resource-limited mobile devices (Sony Reader etc.), but we certainly have lots of scope for improvement.

That being said EPUB is a reflow-centric format, designed to be used in situations where a particular typographic outcome is not the goal. The basic content types of EPUB (XHTML and DAISY DTBook) are not really designed for conveying such information. It is not entirely clear from your post what your expectations are. If they are primarily that Adobe Digital Editions should provide better table support, improved character set support, the option for hyphenation, etc. – well stay tuned. If your expectation is that you can use EPUB to achieve pages that look precisely the same as a printed version – I suggest you will be better off with PDF. We see EPUB complementing PDF, and of course Adobe DIgital Editions and compatible devices support both EPUB and PDF, so that’s always an option if you require a high degree of print fidelity.

Theoretically one could even make an EPUB comprised of a sequence of SVG page images. This would be a very close analog to PDF (Adobe has even proposed an XML serialization of PDF, “Project Mars” that uses SVG for the page descriptions). Of course since we already have PDF as a widely adopted ISO standard, there is no reason to perform unnatural acts with EPUB . I feel that SVG in EPUB should be used sparingly, and primarily for info graphics or other scenarios where a bitmap image would otherwise need to be employed. Anything that CAN be reflowable text in an EPUB, SHOULD be reflowable text.

My clear view of the fugly reality:
http://ebooktest.blogspot.com/2009/04/is-adobe-hindering-ebooks.html

One thing IDPF’s OEB Working Group should consider doing is to query a number of marketing experts about which case form is most appealing to consumers.

Reflowable ebook formats, on the other hand, are “typeset on the fly” on the end-user side to optimally adapt the presentation of the textual content to the particular reading platform and end-user preferences. This comes at the cost of not being able to achieve the same very high level of typographic presentation quality possible to achieve with PDF.

ePub is presently the best reflowable e-book format in that it allows for the highest level of typographic presentation quality for textual content (and ePub’s ability to sufficiently handle textual content mixed with images and multimedia.) Note that I use the word “allows” — what one can achieve in typographically rendering ePub depends upon the capability of the reading system software and hardware, and the quality of the markup and CSS within the ePub publication.

But PDF is not a solution for the vast majority of ebooks, unless publishers want to create many different sizes of PDFs for many different devices and reading systems.

Therefore: ePub was created. And I do agree with Bill that ePub — in its current state — is capable of producing “visually rich books.”

When CSS (and the “Web standards” movement) needed a boost, someone created a website called Zen Garden, http://www.csszengarden.com/
which showcases the capabilities of CSS.

What we need is a free repository of “exemplary ePub ebooks” where designers can display a variety of ePub ebooks that are efficiently and beautifully designed.

And then the rest of us could study these examples, and improve our own ePub creations.

Michael Pastore
50 Benefits of Ebooks

I also defy you to produce vertical text in an ePub.