RE: HTML 5.1 Use Cases

HTML Working Group,
 
If we add scholarly and scientific communication as an HTML 5.1 goal, with the goal that an HTML 5.1 document markup can be styled to any scientific and scholarly document style (http://www.lib.umd.edu/ues/guides/citing-styles), we can consider an illustrative HTML document with a number of titled CSS stylesheets, for many or for each scholarly and scientific document style, for multiple screen sizes and for printing.  The goal of facilitating scholarly and scientific communication with HTML could involve, in addition to some markup topics, topics with regard to several existing CSS modules (http://www.w3.org/TR/#tr_CSS) and possibly some new CSS modules.

Many scientists and technologists have envisioned documents with dynamic layouts (http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-mediaqueries/), multi-column layouts (http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-multicol/), grid-based and region-based layouts (http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-grid-layout/, http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-regions/), mathematical and scientific notations (http://www.w3.org/TR/MathML3/) and stylized printing (http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-mediaqueries/, http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-page/, http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-gcpm/, http://www.w3.org/TR/css-print/), for example printing digital mathematics documents as per the AMS document styles for papers and monographs (ftp://ftp.ams.org/pub/author-info/documentation/handbk.pdf).

While some have indicated multi-column PDF's on ebook readers to be as madness, and others see CSS as crazed, I posit that the above paragraph, describing the W3C approach, describes an acuminous, well-considered, prudent and scalable approach for scientific and scholarly HTML-based documents, digital publishing scenarios, digital books and digital textbooks.



Kind regards,

Adam Sobieski