2015-10-23 18:54 GMT+02:00 John MacFarlane <jgm-TVLZxgkOlNX2fBVCVOL8/A@public.gmane.org>:

Let's try a regular path file on a server, see file attached:
pandoc -o pandoc-server.epub [2]pandoc-server.md
pandoc downloads the file and includes it in the epub. Why?
HTML output does not include external resources by default and you can
include them with option --self-contained. IMO epub output should work
the same. Is it a bug or a design decision?

Design decision. The idea is that EPUBs should be
self-contained electronic books that can be read on your
device even when you don't have an internet connection.

We treat PDFs, docx, odt similarly -- all necessary
resources are downloaded and included.

I see. But while searching the archives of this list I found somebody saying that this behaviour could be outdated now that most of ebook devices have WiFi connection (not to mention the tablets..).

In principle we could change this behavior, but a change in
the default here might break existing workflows. One
possibility would be to make this behavior sensitive to some
kind of flag. For example, if the `data-external` attribute
is set on `<source>` element, don't include in the EPUB.

Yes, this would be nice. It would allow to still have the audio player in the EPUB while keeping the file small. Issue #2473 may be turned into this feature request?

In the meanwhile, I guess that I'll use a simple link to the file.

Thanks

Federico