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w3c
What would be the real guideline on adding cover in XHTML?
Amazon guidelines guide that the book cover is not included in an XHTML file. (topic 4.2) Kobo guidelines guide you to include the cover in an XHTML file. (see here) Several examples that I found have the cover in XHTML.
However, Amazon warns that if the cover is included, it may appear twice on the Kindle. The same is true for iBooks: when you open a book, you first open the cover that the app "interprets" from the "cover" tag and then open the cover of XHTML.
What would be the right thing to do?
If you correctly identify the cover XHTML page in the guide section of the opf (and/or landmarks in the navdoc), Amazon will suppress that XHTML page in favor of the cover image as identified in the opf. I'm not sure if you can omit the EPUB2 guide and just use the EPUB3 landmarks, I have always included it for backwards compatibility so have never tested without it.
iBooks is a slightly different issue. The animation of iBooks "opening" the file does use the cover image before turning to the "bodymatter" landmark, which may or may not be your cover XHTML page. It does not result in the same duplicated cover page when the user swipes to turn pages (as it does in the Amazon system). If this is a concern for you I would suggest setting your bodymatter landmark accurately.
I think we need a consistent way to set CSS for EPUB cover.
In some reading systems cover images are splitting in multiple virtual pages, e.g.:
