I submitted this as a comment to the blog post "Future of WPUB"

Dear PWG

It is no surprise that this situation has arisen, but the path to a solution is not thru tri- or quadfurcation (EPUB 3, EPUB 4, WP, PWP, PDF…). This is “taking the cart before the horse”. 

W3C, together with the IETF, need to address the shortcomings of existing standards. 

The simple problem is:
W3C NEEDS AN ANSWER TO PDF
W3C NEEDS OFFLINE HTML
W3C NEEDED AN ANSWER YEARS AGO!

There are zillions of PDFs out there. The idea that “there is little chance of it [PWP] being adopted by publishers” is ludicrous. This is exactly the type of “market research” that Steve Jobs ridiculed and discredited. The discussion has been turned upside down.

W3C mission is universal web and the vision puts consumers first, not content owners. 

W3C needs Offline HTML or, as I call it, Browser Document Format (BDF). Most of the worlds’ content is delivered in HTML. For much of this content, if it works in a browser online then it should be able to work in a browser offline. 

As many of you might remember, several years ago I produced samples demonstrating several use cases (UC from POV of consumers). I built an authoring system in WordPress (the CMS used by the W3C) that demonstrated creating offline HTML on the fly. Offline HTML can be done now!

The W3C and IETF need to urgently address the need to deliver secure and validated HTML from the file system. While this entails looking at single and multi file solutions, in order to get the ball rolling, I suggest starting with the simplest single file cases – replace saving content as a PDF with tools to generate a single file HTML – as I demonstrated already.

I suggest converting LPF to BDF that will define a single web page and all the extras in one file, with no need for any modified structure or manifest. Instead, I propose focusing on creating an optional file integrity check along with compression and maybe encryption.

And I suggest, if the browsers are not ready to assist in this, the W3C encourage the development of browser extensions to address security and validation issues.

Cheers
Mike

Received on Monday, 8 July 2019 17:52:52 UTC