Publishing in HTML - Re: Welcome to our Publishing CG

Hi Will, James,

Have been lurking on this channel for a while, but I’ve been working with NISO these past years to define an HTML and Linked Data based standard: Content Profiles/Linked Documents. This was a member submission from Elsevier; where we’re actively transitioning to HTML based scholarly publishing.

The standard is here:
https://www.niso.org/publications/z39105-2023-cpld


It’s a high-level standard that lays out how we expect Linked Data and HTML to play together in a scholarly publishing setting. It does not prescribe a schema for the structure of HTML documents; but it provides a framework to do so in the form of “content profiles”. It is fully based on W3C standards. Besides RDF (JSON-LD) and HTML these are the Annotation standard and the Publication Manifest [2]. For RDF schema, it uses Schema.org (but this is surely too limiting).

There are some open source tools for playing with this, in the GitHub repo [3], but I also maintain a VSCode plugin for viewing CPLD documents [4] (the code is contributed to the NISO repo).

Best,
Rinke

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-model/

[2] https://www.w3.org/TR/pub-manifest/

[3] https://github.com/niso-standards/cpld

[4] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Elsevier.cpld-viewer


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Rinke Hoekstra
Sr. Director Architecture – Knowledge
Industry Director of Elsevier’s Discovery Lab
ELSEVIER - Amsterdam
r.hoekstra@elsevier.com<mailto:r.hoekstra@elsevier.com>

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From: James Gifford <james.gifford@nitropress.net>
Date: Monday, 29 January 2024 at 22:06
To: Will Crichton <crichton.will@gmail.com>, Wolfgang Schindler <ws.schindler@googlemail.com>
Cc: public-publishingcg@w3.org <public-publishingcg@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Welcome to our Publishing CG
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On 1/29/2024 1:53 PM, Will Crichton wrote:
My main goal is to make HTML documents an acceptable format in academia.

You've got my vote, here. HTML completely fell out of favor as a document format and is seen by too many as suitable only for structured web pages. It's possibly the best, most flexible, most widely accessible document format there is, with the caveat that there's absolutely no way to rights-protect it.

As a companion to PDF  — which has other, complementary strengths — HTML/CSS needs to be restored as a general long-form document format.

Without, *ahem* the many strictures and stumbling blocks of its implementation within EPUB — mostly the disastrous and crippling lack of standardization in readers. HTML finally grew out of its "No, do it my way!" adolescence, and unless/until EPUB does the same, it will never be a truly competitive doc format.



  —James Gifford

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