Re: Deep concerns about the future of EPUB

Le 26/12/2017 à 19:02, Bill McCoy a écrit :

> That being said I think you're engaging in a logical fallacy by claiming that a single mistake by the IDPF EPUB WG over a year ago implies that we must now radically rethink the way W3C Publishing@W3C groups are structured in general, as well as how ongoing development of EPUB 3 will be handled specifically.

I respectfully disagree 100%. If the market is already unable to digest
3.1 six years after the release of 3.0, when will it be able to digest
4.0, Web Publications, Portable Web Publications and more? Given the
EPUB 3 situation, any investment now on WP, PWP, EPUB4 is too early
and too expensive. The EPUB market is just unable to absorb a new
spec every three years. Our whole model is flawed.

I suggest we take that chartered time to make a 3.x version conform to
regular W3C exit criteria, with a test suite and real implementation
reports, and reach W3C REC (instead of "Recommended Specification" IDPF
designation) instead of diving into useless expensive blue-sky dreams.

*THAT* would be *immensely* useful to *everyone*.

Let me repeat myself on one important point: backwards-compatibility
requirements of EPUB increase as the EPUB market increase. They
will become mandatory soon. An ebook is an ebook is an ebook. Nobody
wants to maintain several technical versions of the same ebook for
a given technology, nobody wants to update (at a cost) ebooks published
eons ago that should just work, nobody wants to leave legacy reading
systems unattended because it could kill the ecosystem, and we're not
even able to get rid of our ugliest design choices any more. Hence my
conclusion: EPUB is a dead end. A technological disruption will happen,
it's not a question of "if" any more but only a question of "when".

</Daniel>

Received on Wednesday, 27 December 2017 10:23:44 UTC