RE: My opinions about the future of EPUB 3.2

Thank you, Dave, for articulating so well what I have been thinking.

Tzviya Siegman
Information Standards Lead
Wiley
201-748-6884
tsiegman@wiley.com<mailto:tsiegman@wiley.com>

From: Dave Cramer <dauwhe@gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, October 29, 2018 1:34 PM
To: Ric Wright <rkwright@geofx.com>
Cc: Ivan Herman <ivan@w3.org>; Laurent Le Meur <laurent.lemeur@edrlab.org>; public-publishingbg@w3.org
Subject: Re: My opinions about the future of EPUB 3.2

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