@Liza – I’m not sure how much use a standard is when nothing (apart from Bookworm, admittedly) conforms to it. It’s really irritating for the standards-conformers.

In fact, a conforming reading system is required to ignore resources that aren’t in the OPF. So any one that did display the CSS here was explicitly misbehaving.

epubcheck might have caught that.
http://code.google.com/p/epubcheck/

Using a program to create the epub file would also make sure everything’s in order. I use eCub, there are others. I like eCub because it doesn’t alter my html or css (if you remember to uncheck “generate css” in the options), and it’s easy to use.
http://www.juliansmart.com/ecub

http://www.idpf.org/2007/ops/OPS_2.0_final_spec.html#Section3.3

specifies all the CSS properties that should be implemented.

ePub is supposed to save us from the tower of ebabel, only … it also slams us all back into the ugliness of html and the different ways different browser (user agents) interpret and display the code. CSS sounds great in theory, but in practice it turned out that different browsers only supported what they wanted to support.

I would ask, then, that the IPDF standardize the rules of rendering that any user agent needs to accept, so that Sony and other companies using ePub can really have industry-standard rendering. Plus the IPDF should publish ‘best practices’ for publishers with specific suggestions as to how to format their texts.

‘Thought breaks’ and rendering verse are pretty basic to publishing, after all!

How many years have the eggheads been working on this? Sheesh.

@Paul – I originally did this sort of thing and of course it worked in a real browser, but when I saw that Stanza was ignoring the top and bottom margin settings (and Bookworm was ignoring everything) it seemed safest to avoid being clever with CSS in this case. I’ve now defined the style almost exactly as you suggest, and it turns out that although Stanza ignores top and bottom margins it honours left ones and also handles ‘text-indent’ properly, so the initial “” is no longer needed. I’ve uploaded a revised version to the same address as before.

@Kirk – there is no @page selector at all in my CSS that I can see. That’s an interesting point abou the Sony Reader, though. I suppose I’ll have to go out and get one.

@Liza – thanks: an email is on its way to you. If there’s any change I can make, I’ll make it; if the bug is yours, then I’ll be glad if my example can help you pin it down.

@Jon – No, I’m not using justification: I let the device decide for itself. You could add to your recipe “Italics, write italicized words _like this_”. I know this is correct because the edition of “Journey to the Centre of the Earth” that I recently read on my iPod does it.

All we can do, for now, is to make sure that our EPUBs are valid.

As you know, IDPF is currently revising the EPUB standards, which might make things easier for the reading devices to render things more accurately.

I liked the ideas, but there’s not solution yet. Whe’re all waiting for it.