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EPUB 3 Becomes Final IDPF Specification
October 12, 2011 | 12:26 pm
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By Gary Price, Editor of InfoDocket.com
From the IPDF Web Site:
The International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) today announced the completion of a major revision to EPUB, the global standard interchange and delivery format for eBooks and other digital publications.
The IDPF membership unanimously voted to elevate EPUB 3.0 to a final IDPF Recommended Specification, publicly available at: http://idpf.org/epub/30.
EPUB 3 was chartered in May 2010 and developed by a global working group of over 100 contributors, reaching Proposed Recommendation status in May, 2011. Based on HTML5, EPUB 3 adds support for rich media (audio, video), interactivity (JavaScript), global language support (including vertical writing), styling and layout enhancements, SVG, embedded fonts, expanded metadata facilities, MathML, and synchronization of audio with text and other enhancements for accessibility.
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Comments:
So in order to support EPUB3, you actually/basically need a webkit based browser? Not sure that is a wise move, in terms of broad reader support. Also support for Video would take some serious umpfh (i.e. the device would have to be quite powerful).
Generally it just sounds like all they want is a modern browser, then why bother with EPUB, just make it live on a server… (Yeah that does not allow for offline reading, unless the “app” supports offline storage – which is a part of the Html5 suite.)
Not based on the formal spec! Most of the shiny new features are optional. Video, audio, javascript. (Possibly even image rendering. “Visual rendering of XHTML” is also optional). I think the most burdensome parts are CSS3 text layout, font embedding, and MathML.
The problem is, “supports EPUB3″ can mean a lot of different things. Not all (conforming) EPUB3 documents will be readable on all (conforming) EPUB3 readers! And there is no standard for explaining this to readers.
Oh, and HTML5 offline doesn’t support (enough storage for) offline video
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I don’t have much opinion on whether these features are worth standardizing. I just think they’re not being very helpful with anything beyond this standardization of technicalities. E.g. EpubCheck 3 is still in beta.
It doesn’t address my pet peeve either; the justification problem. Unless publishers use media queries, but that’s only a partial solution. Justification without hyphenation requires much longer lines for readability.
The one think that would be nice is MathML (or some way to smuggle LaTeX math mode in — and not something that just generates images for formulas!) it you are interested in science books. This is needed even for E Ink readers that won’t have video, JavaScript, etc.