Re: Cover-image redux

Fun! Nicely done, Ric!

On Fri, 27 Jul 2018 at 05:01, Ric Wright <rkwright@geofx.com> wrote:

> *<Garth, brace yourself, more of Ric’s nutty graphics ahead>*
>
> After listening to the discussion on Monday about covers and cover-images,
> I started thinking about what kinds of graphics could be on a cover page.
> Naturally, given my background, I thought of SVG and OpenGL. There is also
> CSS3, with all its bells and whistles too.  So to see what it might be
> like, I created an EPUB with an OpenGL (WebGL) animation on the title
> page.  You can see the result here (Tiny-EPUB GLCover
> <https://readium.firebaseapp.com/?>).
>
> One cannot specify a “cover-image” property which references a XHTML page
> (EPUBCheck throws an error). So I just leave that property out.  In
> Readium, our UA doesn’t see a  cover page, so it just fetches the metadata
> and creates a plain title page, just like normal.  But when the book itself
> is opened, the real, WebGL-enabled title page is shown and voila!  an WebGL
> animation is displayed.  In iBooks, the result is the same except that
> iBooks has a bit of a problem laying out the title page so it’s not quite
> right, probably because iBooks doesn’t handle mixed (reflow/fixed) pages
> very well.
>
> One could also create SVG animations or CSS3 animations as well.  In
> theory, the UA could even figure out that the library page with thumbnails
> should be animated, but the overhead would be huge and the idea of a
> significant number of animations occurring in the library page at one time
> is kind of dizzying. Probably not a good idea.
>
> I am not suggesting that this is a great idea or plan to do it with all my
> books, just demonstrating that within the scope of the EPUB spec as it
> stands you can do some “interesting” demos.
>
> Ric
>
> --
Regards,
Dave
—
David Hyland-Wood, PhD
Ethereum Standards
Protocol Engineering Group and Systems (PegaSys)
ConsenSys.net