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from the documents-definitely-need-javascript dept.
Daniel Glazman believes that EPUB has reached a technical dead end.
- It is impossible to aggregate a set of web pages into a EPUB book through a trivial zip, and it is impossible to unzip an EPUB book and make it readable inside a Web browser even with graceful degradation.
- Despite the International Digital Publishing Forum merging with W3C in January 2017, EPUB continues to diverge from web standards.
- The EPUB 3.1 specification has been rescinded because it is too costly and complex for the eBook industry to adopt.
Mr. Glazman's solution? The WebBook format. From the announcement:
I have then decided to work on a different format for electronic books, called WebBook. A format strictly based on Web technologies and when I say "Web technologies", I mean the most basic ones: html, CSS, JavaScript, SVG and friends; the class of specifications all Web authors use and master on a daily basis. Not all details are decided or even ironed, the proposal is still a work in progress at this point, but I know where I want to go to.
[...] I have started from a list of requirements, something that was never done that way in the EPUB world:
- one URL is enough to retrieve a remote WebBook instance, there is no need to download every resource composing that instance
- the contents of a WebBook instance can be placed inside a Web site's directory and are directly readable by a Web browser using the URL for that directory
- the contents of a WebBook instance can be placed inside a local directory and are directly readable by a Web browser opening its index.html or index.xhtml topmost file
- each individual resource in a WebBook instance, on a Web site or on a local disk, is directly readable by a Web browser
- any html document can be used as content document inside a WebBook instance, without restriction
- any stylesheet, replaced resource (images, audio, video, etc.) or additional resource useable by a html document (JavaScript, manifests, etc.) can be used inside the navigation document or the content documents of a WebBook instance, without restriction
- the navigation document and the content documents inside a WebBook instance can be created and edited by any html editor
- the metadata, table of contents contained in the navigation document of a WebBook instance can be created and edited by any html editor
- the WebBook specification is backwards-compatible
- the WebBook specification is forwards-compatible, at the potential cost of graceful degradation of some content
- WebBook instances can be recognized without having to detect their MIME type
- it's possible to deliver electronic books in a form that is compatible with both WebBook and EPUB 3.0.1
Compatibility with EPUB 3.0.1 is a good way to start adoption. Now to see if WebBook catches on. The GitHub repository is here.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Arik on Monday April 23 2018, @04:08AM (3 children)
The biggest problem is *the inappropriate expectation of* fidelity or reproducibility.
The web's design goals excluded WYSIWYG from the beginning, for good reason. You can't have proper device independence and "fidelity" as you term it - perversely referring to fidelity of *presentation* rather than of content.
It's not just that those who don't rememeber LaTeX keep re-inventing it, poorly - it's that they've succeed in shoe-horning their desires into web standards where they have no place at all.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @04:31AM (2 children)
Why does CSS offer measurements like "6in" for "6 inches" then? What's the point of that?
The real problem is you fuckers fake everything. The CSS half-wits thought it would make sense to re-define "pixel" as a stable measurement: 1 pixel on a "virtual" 90 PPI screen. Why? Because all the moronic, mathless user-experience "engineers" in the world built their tasteless designs around Wintel and the commonest monitors, which were 90 PPI (maybe Microsoft is the one who introduced that stupidity; I don't know). Well, that same fakeness and incompetence seeped into the base models of everything else in Web layout, such that the only sane way for most people do deal with positioning and dimensioning elements is to use a Javascript library to do the calculations on the client at "run-time". But that doesn't matter, anyway, because 20-something-year-old hey-I-just-want-go-climbing-and-hiking-and-post-to-facebook wunderkinds are responsible for coding up these clients.
The problem is not as you describe it.
The problem is that the "Oooo-look-shiny-object" morons are in control of the foundations of our society's infrastructure. We need a reboot.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Arik on Monday April 23 2018, @11:41AM (1 child)
"The problem is not as you describe it. The problem is that the "Oooo-look-shiny-object" morons are in control of the foundations of our society's infrastructure."
CSS is not part of the original design. It was added at the insistence of that same "morons" as you put it, and the justification at the time was that they were already abusing the heck out of HTML trying to control layout, and if we could get them to move that nonsense to a separate CSS file it would result in cleaner HTML files and easier-to-ignore presentation nonsense.
Very similar to the justifications given for adding ecmascript as well.
HTML is hated by "designers" because it is a functional system, not an aesthetic one, and they are the opposite. But this is their malfunction.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @02:18PM
Stylesheets are an ancient idea that are part of an important separation of structure and presentation, and a concept on which the venerated Tim Berners–Lee also apparently worked. Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
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Circumcised knowledge leads to circumcised thought. Proof: Arik