CSS 2.1 feedback from the Open eBook Publication Structure Working Group Editors

In reviewing the CSS 2.1 working draft, some issues of concern have 
arisen among the Open eBook 1.2 Working Group. The Open eBook 
specification subsets CSS 2, and has been adopted by a large number of 
companies, ranging from the publishing world, to desktop operating 
systems, to hand-held devices. Since the specification deals primarily 
with "book" content, paged media is a major concern. We note with 
concern the reduced support in CSS 2.1 for such paged media. 
Specifically, section 13, which used to cover paged media in general 
has been reduced to the previous section 13.3, notably losing support 
for @page. @page was added to OEBPS 1.2 to enable greater content 
control fidelity, which was one of the goals of the 1.2 specification. 
Removing this from CSS 2.1 would require the OEBPS WG to innovate 
outside of the CSS specification to provide similar functionality, an 
action we would prefer to avoid.

In addition to @page, we note that widow and orphan control has been 
removed (formerly section 13.3.3). Although not terribly important in a 
web-based (x)html browser, this level of control is crucial when 
defining paged media. These properties have also been added to the 
OEBPS 1.2 specification, which was just passed by the OEBF membership. 
There exists at least one implementation of OEB that supports the 
widows and orphans properties, there may be others as well. Again, 
removing these properties from CSS 2.1 would do a great disservice to 
the growing eBook community, and would require unnecessary extensions 
to the OEB specification.

The editors of the Open eBook Publication Structure Working Group hope 
you consider returning some or all of the paged media properties. In 
addition to these properties, a handful of others were also recently 
added to the OEBPS 1.2 specification (e.g. values of left and right on 
caption-side), however these were mainly included to better conform 
with CSS 2.0, and are not consider to be of vital importance.

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

Brady Duga
OPEBPS 1.2 co-editor

Received on Wednesday, 21 August 2002 14:16:43 UTC