Re: [Minutes] PMWG 2025-05-08

I'd like to comment on allowing html syntax in EPUB 3.4.

While I understand the technical reasons behind the change, and agree with them for the most part, allowing html syntax in EPUB 3.* would be a terrible marketing decision. Because of this, Project Gutenberg would not implement 3.4 and I would counsel other organizations I advise not to implement any support for it. We have touted our implementation of EPUB3 for over 75,000 titles despite its inconsitent implementation in reading systems. When something doesn't work it causes support issues for us. We continue to produce EPUB2 files because certain strongly desired functionalities don't work in systems that claim to support EPUB3. (I'm looking at you, ADE.) It's clear that there will be reading systems that just won't work with HTML syntax, and users of those systems will have no way to know if the files they acquire will work with the systems they use. Even if we were to produce EPUB 3.4 files with XML syntax, we would struggle to communicate that to a user who has experienced failures with other EPUB3 files. Those failures would be black marks against the EPUB label or "brand".

Has anyone articulated a benefit to end users for this change?

By contrast, a distinguishing label like  "EPUB+" for even this technically modest change would encourage adoption by reading systems developers, and by their customers. For distributors like us, it would allow us to easily communicate a modernization step without a lot of work on the backend.


Eric Hellman
President, Free Ebook Foundation
http://ebookfoundation.org <http://ebookfoundation.org/>
https://bsky.app/profile/gluejar.com



> On May 8, 2025, at 10:20 AM, Ivan Herman <ivan@w3.org> wrote:
> 
> Minutes are here:
> 
>   https://w3c.github.io/pm-wg/minutes/2025-05-08.html
> 
> Ivan
> 
> ----
> Ivan Herman, W3C 
> Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/
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>