EPub files HTML or XHTML?

Until today, I was exporting ePub files from Pages. It produces XHTML ePub files, which I then edited in BBEdit. The edits worked, but there were myriad other problems, so…
…I bought CS5.5 and…
I noticed several things:
1. InDesign 5.5 doesn't export XHTML formatted files, but HTML.
2. When I checked the syntax of these files in BBEdit, there were the following errors:
     Unknown or invalid DOCTYPE detected; syntax checker will assume "HTML 5".
     Document type doesn't permit attribute "xmlns" within element "<html>".
     Document type doesn't permit attribute "xml:lang" within element "<div>".
3. In addition, when I rezipped and sent the ePub to iBooks, the formatting I'd added wasn't there (though it had previewed perfectly in BBEdit and browsers).
4. I then replaced everything above the opening <head> element with the lines from a Pages-exported file. The error messages disappeared, but the formatting still wasn't there in iBooks.
As a near-novice, I can't figure out what's going on. Is there some kind of mismatch between XHTML and HTML?
Thanks.

For what it's worth, the formatting appeared correctly in iBooks when I replaced this line (which appeared immediately below the <head> element)
     <div id="x03-Preparing.html" xml:lang="en-US">
with this one:
     <div id="x15-Preparing.html" >
(removing: xml:lang="en-US")
The language declaration was already made above. See whole section:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html
PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
<html xml:lang="en" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
     <head>
              <title>03 Preparing.html</title>
              <link href="template.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
     </head>
     <body>
          <div id="x03-Preparing.html" >… (etc.)
I remain puzzled about HTML vs. XHTML. Liz Castro says the ePub's content files should be in XHTML. Not true?

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EPUP export html files instead of xhtml

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I did some experimenting with this a few months ago.
The basis of the epub format is XHTML. There are free tools (such as Calibre) that do a good job converting from (X)HTML to epub (and other e-book formats).
If you have one book to do it is probably quickest just to grab the text and reformat with an HTML editor, then process with Calibre or similar.
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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>
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http://www.zenodesign.com/forum/encodetest/UTF8.html
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If you don't mind cracking open the ePub and editing template.css, then adding rules like:
h2 {
page-break-before: always;
should force each paragraph whose style is mapped to an h2 tag on to a new page. Whether or not it works will depend on how good the ePub reader is at implementing CSS. It seems to work for Digital Editions and also Kindle, if you convert ePub to Kindle format.
This doesn't help at all if you are trying to force sections into separate XHTML files, though.

How to control the size of SVG images in epub files?

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Most of my images in jpg convertes nicely, but the small ones do not.
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Hi all
I posted this in the InDesign forum a few days ago but got no response, so I'm trying here. My apologies for the double-up.
I'm about to start preparing ePUB files (from InDesign CS4) for a particular distributor whose instructions state:
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When I check my initial test files using PDFXML Inspector (with pretty printing turned off — thanks Gabriel Powell) the first line states only “<?xml version="1.0"?>”.
I ran a test by simply adding the "encoding="UTF-8"" bit to that line and everything seems to work fine in Calibre and Digital Editions (as it did with the unedited version — there seems to be no difference).
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d.

Hi Frances,
Please be aware that I have not got any ePubs to the retail stage as yet, I was working flatout on a bunch of ePubs for a few months when the project got put on the backburner — so my experience is limited.
I'm not sure what your process is, but InDesign CS4 does an OK job of creating ePubs — just so long as you set the files up correctly (eg. the easiest way to get page breaks between chapters is to save each chapter as a separate InDesign file and then combine them in a book. ALSO, everything should be styled using paragraph, character and oject styles)
Unless CS5 has SIGNIFICANT upgraded support for ePub, you might be wasting your money.
Check out the excellent tutorials by Gabriel Powell
He gives the most outstanding introduction to ePUB from InDesign I've yet seen.
PDF
http://www.creativepro.com/article/making-ebooks-indesign-part-1
Video
http://instantindesign.com/index.php?view=413
A couple of things I found I needed to do to get ePubs looking right in anything other than ADE:
• I got a better result if I wrote my own CSS — InDesign does not do a good job of this at all, AFAIC. Export style names only and use these as the basis for your CSS.
• Indesign fails to list fonts in the manifest, so if you want to specify your own fonts you need to add them manually and reference them in the manifest. Don't bother trying to embed fonts at export — it causes too many problems, it seems.
• The only thing I need to do in the xhtml files is fix a few non-alpha characters sometimes (like bullets, apostrophes, quotes, etc) I've no idea why these sometimes fail and sometimes don't.
FYI:
I use both Calibre and ADE to view ePubs — because they will each highlight different issues.
I built my CSS and a few other bits and pieces in Text Edit — this makes it easy to re-use things like the CSS for multiple publications.
I use PDFXML Inspector to do the editing — this allows siginificant editing capability without the need to unpack the ePub.
And I use Terminal to repackage ePubs (ie. after adding a fonts folder, or whatever) — using the command lines in Gabriel Powell's tutorial.
ie. I've spent nothing on additional software — it's all either free or already on the Mac.
It's a very steep, frustrating learning curve — LOTS of trial and LOTS of error. But it's also fun.
Good luck
d.

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27 April 2012
Dear Apple Support Community:
Greetings. I am using an updated version of Pages to create a file to be exported as an ePub. The exported file as an ePub is fine when viewed on my iPod Touch as an iBook. However, the ePub/iBook contains some blank pages that I did not insert. Whether in portrait or landscape mode, there are blank pages that should not exist. Again and again, I have deleted blank spaces at the top and bottom of pages in Pages, but the resulting ePub (displayed as an iBook on my iPod Touch) still has blank pages. When I view the pre-EPUB file in Pages, I cannot and do not detect any blank pages.
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Message was edited by: excelsus

Hi Anne
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<https://www.google.com/search?q=quickview+plugins&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=or g.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&channel=sb#channel=sb&q=epub+quickview +plugins&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official>

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Message was edited by: SueC2009

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I was reading a few blogs online last night and saw one (and can't now find it) that mentions that it's possible to email non-DRM ePub files to yourself and then open those files in iBooks (circumventing iTunes).
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