Re: EPUB and XML [was: The non-polyglot elephant in the room]

Leif,

re: polyglot XHTML5 being a good fit, sure, why not be able to have
content that can be served up as both HTML and/or XML? And polyglot
gives practical advantages in re: integration of SVG and MathML.

I believe EPUB 3.0 was well down the track before the polyglot notion
was fleshed out (it seems even now it is still an Editors Draft), and
if we had *required* polyglot that would have even further narrowed
what kind of HTML5 content was acceptable in EPUB.

But if polyglot markup becomes a stable specification that's more
widely adopted, e.g. in CMS systems, then requiring it in the future
could be an interesting option for something like an EPUB 4. It's
already common to render EPUB publications via browser-based "cloud
readers". But who knows, by the time of HTML6 maybe the discussion
will be about a JSON encoding of HTML rather than arguments about XML
vs. "tag soup".

--Bill

On Sun, Jan 27, 2013 at 11:55 AM, Leif Halvard Silli
<xn--mlform-iua@xn--mlform-iua.no> wrote:
> Bill, regarding polyglot markup …
>
> Bill McCoy, Sun, 27 Jan 2013 07:25:51 -0800:
>> I agree with you that for those using XML of whatever flavor for their
>> core content, generating XHTML in creating EPUB is a good fit, since
>> by definition they will have XML-oriented toolchains in place.
>   […]
>> But as Web/EPUB has become a more central output for many content
>> publishers, and with HTML5 having more semantic elements and means for
>> microdata / semantic inflection, there's been something of a trend
>> towards certain book publishers (at least) looking at (X)HTML as an
>> option for the core content structure not just as a generated output
>> format. This has been helped along by  popular blogging platforms like
>> WordPress and Drupal having (X)HTML as their internal article storage
>> format,
>
> doesn't all this make polyglot XHTML5 seem like a good fit? E.g. as a
> "transition" format?
> --
> leif halvard silli

Received on Monday, 28 January 2013 16:42:30 UTC