Re: [pwp] Progressive enhancement of digital books

On Dec 3, 2015, at 9:08 PM, Florian Rivoal <florian@rivoal.net> wrote:

> prev/next exist today in theory, but in practice most UAs don't do anything with them. While a <nav> section in index.html would work just fine in todays browsers. Even if they don't understand that this particular <nav> is special, it's still full of links that the user can follow.

I'm not inclined to give up on prev/next so easily. It is an existing HTML property that describes exactly what we want. Most browsers do not currently provide a user action based on this feature, but it's so easy to polyfill that even I can do it. It's also self-contained, in that you can know where to go next based only on the current document.

Nav in today's browser does enable you to reach all the content. But I hope for a better reader experience than "go to nav, remember what chapter is next, then click on the link. Of course this can be polyfilled, too.

>
> Also, the semantics of prev/next aren't that straightforward, as they let you create non linear reading orders (loops, forks, going back to something else than where you can from...). Maybe this is a good thing, as it is quite expressive, but I think it can just as easily be considered a footgun. Maybe we could enforce sanity of the prev/next relationships at the validator level.

I think that expressiveness is quite useful, and an advantage over what is in EPUB 3.0.1 today.  A validator that enforced "sanity" would be a remarkable thing; perhaps we could settle for a validator that would offer an informational note if the sequence of nests was not purely linear.

Dave

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Received on Friday, 4 December 2015 13:52:01 UTC