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posted by chromas on Sunday April 22 2018, @11:39PM   Printer-friendly
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  • The EPUB 3.1 specification has been rescinded because it is too costly and complex for the eBook industry to adopt.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:

  1. one URL is enough to retrieve a remote WebBook instance, there is no need to download every resource composing that instance
  2. 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
  3. 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
  4. each individual resource in a WebBook instance, on a Web site or on a local disk, is directly readable by a Web browser
  5. any html document can be used as content document inside a WebBook instance, without restriction
  6. 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
  7. the navigation document and the content documents inside a WebBook instance can be created and edited by any html editor
  8. the metadata, table of contents contained in the navigation document of a WebBook instance can be created and edited by any html editor
  9. the WebBook specification is backwards-compatible
  10. the WebBook specification is forwards-compatible, at the potential cost of graceful degradation of some content
  11. WebBook instances can be recognized without having to detect their MIME type
  12. 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.


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  • (Score: 2) by zocalo on Monday April 23 2018, @07:00AM (1 child)

    by zocalo (302) on Monday April 23 2018, @07:00AM (#670648)
    You don't need JavaScript for annotation, you just need a standardised way for an eBook reader to inject marked up comments into the source HTML using non-displaying tags that reference the actual content (which could be plain text or rich HTML) in a sidecar file, e.g something like:

    <annotation ID=1234>text being commented on</annotation>

    Alternatively, you could just have the annotations as a byte offset in the sidecar file if you don't mind a little more overhead when you re-open each chapter as they get re-inserted. Optionally, you could also add a user ID tag so multiple people could annotate the same ebook (who doesn't like reading the notes of a reference book's previous owner?), and since all of the annotations would be in a sidecar file it would be fairly straightfoward to redistribute the ebook with or without the notes. All the code required could then be natively compiled in the ebook reader, rather than providing a potential attack vector for malicious JavaScript embedded in the book. The only real gotcha I can think of so far would be if you manually shared the ebook without the sidecar file as it would then still have any inline annotation markup in place in the source, so an annotation supporting reader would need to be able to clean up or work around the orphaned annotation markup.

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  • (Score: 2) by JNCF on Monday April 23 2018, @07:49PM

    by JNCF (4317) on Monday April 23 2018, @07:49PM (#670852) Journal

    I like your proposal. I'd really like there to be something of this nature for webpages in general, though I'm sketchy on the details (tradeoffs are difficult). Of course, we're no longer strictly dealing with existing web technologies. That's fine, perhaps desirable, but I think my original post is still valid in context.