Re: My opinions about the future of EPUB 3.2

On Mon, Oct 29, 2018 at 11:57 AM Ric Wright <rkwright@geofx.com> wrote:

>
> My point is that achieving interoperability will require some impetus for
> reading systems and publishers to ensure their solutions are interoperable.
>   What is that impetus?  Why will reading systems and publishers spend
> non-trivial time, money and opportunity to achieve interoperability?  If we
> can’t answer that then it seems like we are dead in the water.
>
>
This is a critical point. Making any progress requires people doing work.

Someone once described the EPUB spec as a contract between authors and
reading systems. If authors follow the spec when creating books, then
reading systems will display them reasonably.

Bugs are evidence of a broken contract. The actual problem may be in the
spec, or the reading system. But figuring that out, and fixing what's
broken is the only way I can think of to improve interoperability between
publishers and reading systems. I'm proposing that we start a serious
effort to create tests, document bugs, and encourage reading systems to fix
such bugs.

Like many of you, I've been doing this for a long time. Our core principle
is to provide a single EPUB file to the marketplace. The whole publishing
industry has done a decent job of following the specs, thanks to epubcheck.
Yet I'm still working around bugs that are probably old enough to vote.

Right now our only solution is to wait for old, buggy reading systems to
lose enough market share so we can ignore them, and thus increase the
lowest common denominator. So we make progress in ending support for KF7,
where margin-top sometimes doesn't work, and now we work around bugs in
RMSDK, so we can't use text-transform. There's got to be a better way.

“The impossible attracts me because everything possible has been done and
the world didn’t change.”  —Sun Ra

Dave