[CEUD-ICT] Joe Clark on the (technical) future of e-books...

Thu Mar 11 15:43:08 GMT 2010

Hi Barry,
interesting developments and opinions from Joe Clark.  I think it also puts
to bed an even earlier discussion we had on this forum about the ill-fated
proprietary format we saw an Irish company try to run with based on the
compiled html (CHM) format.  The USP of this was that it dealt with entire
documents as opposed to multiple files on the web (never did quite get that
one)
<http://list.universaldesign.ie/pipermail/ceud-ict/2005/000088.html>

(Looks like the search engine on the list archives website has fallen over
- will look into it)
<http://list.universaldesign.ie/pipermail/ceud-ict>

What's confusing me at the moment is all this talk of the iPad not
supporting flash which some people say will be replaced in time by HTML 5.
Having never really caught onto why we needed a HTML 5, (isn't XHTML
perfectly fine) inspite of Josh's extensive reporting of it on this list, I
am beginning to think HTML 5 is not the animal I thought it was. Surely
these are 2 completely different types of technology.  Can HTML 5 render
images and animation the same way flash does?

Any enlightenment welcome.

Regards,
Dónal.

             Barry McMullin                                                
             <barry.mcmullin at d                                             
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             11/03/2010 08:04          [CEUD-ICT] Joe Clark on the         
                                       (technical) future of e-books...    

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Hi Folks -

Another nice (provocative?) post from Joe Clark on "A List Apart":

   "The electronic book is the latest example of how HTML
   continues to win out over competing, often nonstandardized,
   formats. E-books aren’t websites, but E-books are distributed
   electronically. Now the dominant E-book format is XHTML."

   <http://www.alistapart.com/articles/ebookstandards/>

OK, I have a personal interest because I have long argued that
(X)HTML *can* be a good, accessible, format for electronic
publication of (long) texts:

<http://eaccess.rince.ie/white-papers/2006/pdf-eaccess/>

But what Clark is now pointing out is that, with the arrival of a
standardised "packaging" format (for collections of HTML + CSS
plus possibly other "embedded" resources such as images), namely
ePub, a key weakness of HTML for "long" texts has been rectified.
An ePub packaged document could (or should) be just as convenient
for offline storage and dissemination as the formats
"traditionally" used for this purpose (PDF, MS-word etc.). See
also this previous discussion here:

<http://list.universaldesign.ie/pipermail/ceud-ict/2009/thread.html#1911>

For what it is worth, there is already an "ePub reader" extension
available for firefox:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/45281

Of course, it is still very early days for ePub, and the tendency
to wrap it up in DRM is not helpful for accessibility (or
usability in general).

Still ... these are all interesting straws in the wind.

Best - Barry.

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