- From: Daniel Glazman <daniel.glazman@disruptive-innovations.com>
- Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2018 16:23:15 +0100
- To: EPUB 3 Community Group <public-epub3@w3.org>, "public-publ-wg@w3.org" <public-publ-wg@w3.org>, "public-publishingbg@w3.org" <public-publishingbg@w3.org>
- Cc: Jeff Jaffe <jeff@w3.org>
Dear EPUB3 CG, Publishing WG and Publishing BG, As some of you already know, I started collecting ideas about what could be a more Web-centric future for ebooks quite a while ago, under the E0 name, following years of advocating in favour of W3C/IDPF joint efforts and even merger. A week ago, I have decided to materialize that effort into a spec proposal called WebBook. WebBook is at the same time fully Web-centric *AND* compatible with EPUB3 since it's almost trivial to turn a given EPUB3 package into a WebBook instance compatible with EPUB3. I am contributing a Node.js script able to automagically convert a EPUB3 package into a EPUB3-compatible WebBook instance. I think such a way of doing represents a workable path towards a real Web-centric ebook ecosystem at a speed the industry can cope with, and with a slow but clear replacement strategy. It would also finally enable the emergence of a large software ecosystem for electronic books, ecosystem that is currently totally anemic given the complexity of EPUB. Last but not least, no more XML, no more JSON, no more formats that browsers cannot natively deal with without programmatic layer. Greater convergence with CSS (pagination, cross-document counters and references, multi-doc rendering using Houdini), html (metadata) and more. We can do it and we can do it now. We don't have to ditch EPUB now to make it happen. We can build a VERY different future preserving compat with EPUB3. http://is.gd/cIaB99 Best regards, </Daniel>
Received on Thursday, 18 January 2018 15:23:50 UTC