29 EPUB

The log on rr reminded me of my issues with EPUB. It is an extremely irritating format due to its complexity. It essentially demands that you provide an entire web rendering engine to render a book if you want to support the full standard. This is because it tries to do everything for everybody.

I have been brainstorming markup languages for my own projects, including Adhyētā, and have a few in the works. I have been wondering for a while now about what a regular work of fiction even needs as far as markup is concerned, and have talked about it on more than one ocassion.

My preliminary conclusion is that these features are sufficient:

• headings
• paragraphs
• emphasis
• block quotes
• lists
• links
• inline images

A simple dialect of MD with a TOC, with the files in a ZIP container, would work beautifully. You could even add footnote support to it without making the format complex.

Styling would be the responsibility of the reader. It knows the 7-8 types of nodes that a book can contain and can expose font and color options for each of those.

This is on my TODO list.