- From: Peter F. Patel-Schneider <pfpschneider@gmail.com>
- Date: Sun, 25 Feb 2018 12:55:26 -0800
- To: Ruben Verborgh <Ruben.Verborgh@UGent.be>
- Cc: Axel Polleres <axel@polleres.net>, "Simon.Cox@csiro.au" <Simon.Cox@csiro.au>, Harry Halpin <hhalpin@ibiblio.org>, "info@csarven.ca" <info@csarven.ca>, "semantic-web@w3.org" <semantic-web@w3.org>
So you are saying that all this is possible for HTML5. Someone then needs to put together a description of how all it works, and build a checker that an HTML5 document meets the requirements of some particular publishing format, and show that these self-contained documents render correctly on different platforms, even platforms with limited resources, and also render correctly when printed, all without requiring any remote resources. And there has to be some assurance that this will continue to be the case. That is the minimum needed to show that HTML5 can be used for scholarly publishing. But that's not sufficient for HTML5 to be selected as the distribution mechanism any time soon. There also needs to be a way to turn the output of current popular content creation systems, particularly those using LaTeX and Word, into HTML5. Alternatively, these systems need to be supplanted in use by new systems. peter On 02/25/2018 12:23 PM, Ruben Verborgh wrote: > Dear Peter, > > Note that all of your items can be achieved with the current Web technology stack: > >> - self-contained documents > You can embed all resources in an HTML document, > by inlining styles and scripts, and using data: URIs. > >> - a document as a sequence of pages with non-varying line width and page height > You can obtain that with CSS. > Set a consistent line-height in points, > and specify the page dimensions. > >> - non-varying fonts and glyphs, renderable at different resolutions > This is possible with system fonts and WOFF fonts. > >> - non-varying embedded graphics, renderable at different resolutions > This is possible with SVG. > >> - multiple popular ways to produce conformant documents > There exist many editors for HTML, CSS, SVG. > >> - multiple popular ways to render at low cost > There exist many free browsers. > >> (Yes, some of these are not true of PDF itself, but instead are true of the >> standard uses of PDF in scholarly publishing.) > Likewise, some of the things mentioned above are not universal HTML practices > (in particular the embedding of all resources), but are technologically possible. > > From the above, I conclude that the technological advantages alone should not be a burden. > Please let me know what other burdens you see. > > Best, > > Ruben
Received on Sunday, 25 February 2018 20:55:52 UTC