It makes a lot of sense when you recall that HTML and its ancestors were designed to mark up and format documents, i.e. books. One of the most fundamental eleme

It makes a lot of sense when you recall that HTML and its ancestors were designed to mark up and format documents, i.e. books. One of the most fundamental elements is <p>, which stands for... paragraph. Each renderer differs in capabilities, and most are stuck in a subset of early-2000s capabilities, so designing an ebook is very much like designing for the 90s era web. Lots of hacks are required to get the same file to look good on many different renderers, and achieving that is one of the goals of Standard Ebooks.