December Adventure Day 14

Dec 14, 2025 - ⧖ 2 min

Published as part of 'December Adventure 2025' series.

This morning I continued my adjustments to make Frankenstein work.

Each xhtml file in a Standard Ebook epub file basically looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
      xmlns:epub="http://www.idpf.org/2007/ops"
      lang="en-GB"
      epub:prefix="z3998: http://www.daisy.org/z3998/2012/vocab/structure/, se: https://standardebooks.org/vocab/1.0" xml:lang="en-GB">
	<head>
		<title>Chapter XXIII</title>
		<link href="../css/core.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
		<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
	</head>
	<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
		<section id="chapter-23" role="doc-chapter" epub:type="chapter">
			<h2>
				<span epub:type="label">Chapter</span>
				<span epub:type="ordinal z3998:roman">XXIII</span>
			</h2>
			<p>It was eight o’clock when we landed...</p>
            <p>...</p>
            <p>...</p>
            ...
		</section>
	</body>
</html>

One assumption of the script that splits up the xhtml files is that each immediate child of the <body>'s <section> will be "small". So all it does is take each child, see if adding it to the current chunk is still within the size threshold and either add it or make a new chunk.

However, Frankenstein proved that assumption false. There were two examples of children that were big: another <section> and <blockquote>. The <blockquote> examples are kind of fun, because Frankenstein is a story-within-a-story (-within-a-story...).

Today's solution was to "unwrap" <section>s. A <section> doesn't do anything in a fediverse post, so it seems safe to do that.

<blockquote>s impact rendering so I'm unwrapping it, but re-wrapping each child in its own <blockquote>. So this:

<blockquote>
  <p>Three be the things I shall have till I die:</p>
  <p>Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye.</p>
</blockquote>

Becomes this:

<blockquote>
  <p>Three be the things I shall have till I die:</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
  <p>Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye.</p>
</blockquote>

Semantically bad, structurally questionable, but renders fine.

Good enough for me.