AW: Thoughts on the future of EPUB 3

Thanks Dave, for your inspiring post!

I think you remind us of the strategic importance of taking the perspective of the *users* of our spec and their *customers*.

For a publisher, a spec may only be "used" in practice if there is a sufficient number of stable, "comfy" user agents that support the features of this spec. These UAs would have to be deployed on a larger scale before you would think of developing any product based on this spec. This is a necessary precondition as it doesn't make sense to develop a product that only a tiny minority of potential customers could consume.

Developing a new product is a great investment so that you should expect a decent ROI. Internal qualities - such as clean or shorter code - are not visible to and typically don't matter for the end user, so that the decisive point for a new technology is IMO that you may either reduce your internal efforts (time to market, manpower) and are thus saving costs or even better that the new features translate to a better UX. You will - as usual - have to look at things from the end user's perspective, what he or she really needs and wants, and not what we as publishers think is very nice.

I suppose that it would be out of scope for us to make a marketing research, what features consumer would love to see, but I think if older EPUB versions are seen as good enough, we should think which features are really helpful for consumers to serve as USPs for EPUB 3, WP, PWP, etc. first for publishers, then for comsumers.

Besides that, I think it would be helpful for our discussions in Github and on the mailing list if we see more concrete examples of code to give us a better idea of the potential options. I like the idea of rapid prototyping to see quickly what works and what doesn't and to refine things in several iterations.

Have a nice weekend!
Wolfgang

De : Dave Cramer <dauwhe@gmail.com<mailto:dauwhe@gmail.com>>
Date : jeudi 18 janvier 2018 à 16:36
À : "public-epub3@w3.org<mailto:public-epub3@w3.org>" <public-epub3@w3.org<mailto:public-epub3@w3.org>>, "public-publishingbg@w3.org<mailto:public-publishingbg@w3.org>" <public-publishingbg@w3.org<mailto:public-publishingbg@w3.org>>
Objet : Thoughts on the future of EPUB 3
Renvoyer - De : <public-publishingbg@w3.org<mailto:public-publishingbg@w3.org>>
Renvoyer - Date : jeudi 18 janvier 2018 à 16:36

Inspired by the recent debate about EPUB 3.1 and backward compatibility, I wrote a blog post on the future of EPUB 3, compatibility, mistakes, and even old versions of EPUB being "good enough." I think there is much we can learn from the web on this subject.

http://epubsecrets.com/good-enough-a-meditation-on-the-past-present-and-future-of-epub.php

Thanks,

Dave