Re: Minutes from EPUB.Next

On 28/10/2021 23:18, Ruth Tait wrote:
> I am a designer/artist who spent 2 years working on an MA thesis
> exploring possibilities of EPUB as a dissemination vehicle that supports
> self-publishing, accessibility and offline rich media.

I went the other way. My thesis was on the usability of editing software
for structured documents (XML, LaTeX, XHTML, etc) and as I wrote it in
DocBook XML, in a way it behoved me to eat my own dogfood and produce an
EPUB as well as a PDF.

https://cora.ucc.ie/handle/10468/1690

What that experience highlighted was that while XHTML provides just
about enough markup to mark up structured technical documents, the
readers are fairly poor at rendering anything beyond headings,
paragraphs, lists, and the very simplest of tables. As the EPUB was a
side-effort at the time, I gave up trying to fix all the problems.

I have been playing with CSS3 for a recipes web site, rendering raw XML
directly, without any intervening HTML. I'm impressed by what CSS is now
offering, although again the browsers differ in their interpretation and
implementation, but I have not yet investigated it for paged media.

https://www.balisage.net/Proceedings/vol26/html/Flynn01/BalisageVol26-Flynn01.html

Reports of the death of PDF are very much exaggerated, I think.

///Peter
-- 
Peter Flynn PhD FICS
Cork 🇮🇪 Ireland 🇪🇺

Received on Thursday, 28 October 2021 22:41:13 UTC