Something else you can’t do on the iPad unless you’re Apple or you have your own complete HTML5/CSS3 HTML rendering stack lying around.
Here we see a few weird & wonderful things:
- A single highlight spanning multiple paragraphs. In a UIWebView, you can’t drag a selection area across paragraph boundaries at all. That functionality is reserved for iBooks.
- Backgrounds which span partial tag pairs. Note that the highlight also includes part but not all of the italic text. There’s either an
<i>or an<em>or a<span>tag happening there. Trying to apply a new span element to the highlighted area would fail because it would enclose an opening tag but not the closing one, which isn’t possible.
Grumble. Well, I’m sure I can now stop using the Apple technology they advocated for my app and then go back to the drawing board and spend a year or so writing my own version from scratch and debugging it and qualifying it with a zillion books and keeping it up to date with a couple thousand new epubs each week while still being one of four developers working full-time on the app as a whole. That won’t be at all a pain.
Interesting side-note: WebCore and JavaScriptCore are LGPL. Shouldn’t I be allowed to link against them or replace them with newer or customized versions (for my app anyway) in that case?
