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Is HTML5 the Future of Book Authorship?
occidental writes "Sanders Kleinfeld writes: In the past six years, the rise of the ebook has ushered in three successive revolutions that have roiled and reshaped the traditional publishing industry. Revolution #3 isn't really defined by a new piece of hardware, software product, or platform. Instead, it's really marked by a dramatic paradigm change among authors and publishers, who are shifting their toolsets away from legacy word processing and desktop publishing suites, and toward HTML5 and tools built on the Open Web Platform."
No.
The obvious answer to this is no, by the law of headlines. However, taking a look at the material does lend itself to the possibility of a good workflow. My own concerns would be with going from LaTeX now — there is some stuff on offer that could be quite excellent once further developed and supported.
Unless the two dominant sources of e-books (Amazon and Apple) support it: no.
These problems were solved years ago....
From the article: "HTML5 is actually an excellent source format for producing paginated content, as the CSS3 Paged Media Module can be utilized to design the eqiuivalent of a standard book template for print." But which popular user agents implement CSS3 paged media? It appears to be so obscure that caniuse.com has no results for "paged". This claims that only "labs" (alpha?) builds of Opera support it, and that was probably before Opera switched to being yet another WebKit wrapper. Wikipedia claims that most of the CSS3 paged media properties are completely unsupported in popular browsers.
I will never go back to anything containing "TeX" in the name.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I'm living large with XML'd e-pubs, but I do use a bit of HTML5 storage in a few of my apps.
It would not be surprising to see O'Reilly, Microsoft Press, and other publishers of documentation of fast-evolving products to switch pretty much entirely to a digital format over the next 5-10 years. Also non-fiction ghostwritten by celebrities, or other disposable works written to cash in on some hot topic like a new diet.
Serious fiction, academic textbooks and other non-fiction with an extended shelf life are a different matter. Paper is more reader-friendly.
Two weeks ago I published the web edition of the Graphics Codex. It is HTML5, with full LaTeX, SVG, and complex text layout for quality and Javascript + links for interactivity. This is a port of the earlier iOS edition that I wrote, which had similar features but wasn't HTML5. After having written several traditional books and seen them massacred by conversion to PDF, MOBI, and ePUB, I think that HTML5 from the start is the way to go for future publishing.
If you're talking about actual writing of most common forms of books... i.e. novels... No. That's going to remain with Word, Scrivener, etc. At that level, HTML is a hidden/internal or after-the-writing format that the writer cares and knows as little about as they do Postscript or PCL printer languages.
Perhaps for more complexly formatted books and for web pages and web apps... but even there... more likely to be a behind-the-scenes after-the-writing format than something that the writer/designer/programmer deals with directly.
You can't easily specify printout options with HTML for one...
Twinstiq, game news
No, it is not.
Because we're in for a sustained campaign of "all documents in the cloud" opinion pieces driven courtesy of cloud providers and companies that make money off of sniffing your panties, like Google.
HTML 5 as of now represents a regressive step in page layout and rendering relative to what can be done by other word processing technologies. It's good for making web pages but as a universal lingua for all written communication it's lacking a lot. Also the really interesting things around the evolution of written documents and writing itself are outside of the scope of HTML5 and as such represent non-standardized efforts by privater groups and individuals. We're talking things like novel representations of information and collaborative editing.
Those things will may be open sourced or closed source efforts. Even if they're open sourced, that's still not a standard and are not going to be standards since the process of creating standards is always (over) run by competing commercial interests who attempt to define those standards to advantage themselves and disadvantage their competitors . This is why the standards process proceeds at a glacial pace,, if it ever concludes at all, why the *real* people quit such committees in disgust.
Everything in the cloud is the Next Big Thing according to the people with Big Money who spend their time trying to discover / create / profit from The Next Big Thing. That doesn't mean it serves any real need. The play here is to "get as many people using it as possible, like Twitter and Facebook and Pinterest, then through the magic of network effects, everyone WILL use it. Then - profit.
The thing is, is doesn't solve any problem but it creates lots of new ones around security and privacy .
Sure, sharing group oriented documents at some points in their creation implies they're living on a server somewhere. And there are models of group authorship which are superior to lone efforts- Wikipedia is of course the best known.
But the death of custom word processors and the death of private storage and the death of general purpose computing CPUs ? I mean, I am sure there are forces in society who not only earnestly hope for such outcomes, but campaign for them using all their considerable resources, it's just one of those things people are smart enough to reject.
So how will this revolution make sure that the writer gets paid? As Harlan Elison says, Pay the Writer! Don't get me wrong, I love writing and am not looking for top dollar for my own small efforts, but all I see is sites wanting free writing. I do it myself, but at least I don't have ad dollars coming in off the backs of the few people who contribute to my site.
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
SO how did chm work out? You see many books in that.
Put simply the stuff I am writing is not in HTML format and never will be if I can help it.
You should check out BookJS ( http://sourcefabric.github.io/BookJS/ ). It's made so you can design book pages in the Chrome browser and create PDFs using the browser's print-to-pdf function. it can handle footnotes, floats, margin notes, etc. . It's being used in Fidus Writer ( http://www.fiduswriter.org/ ) and Booktype ( http://www.sourcefabric.org/en/booktype/ ). However, going on with Fidus writer, I am less sure that book editing can be directly done woith HTML, without a large amount of Javascript, basically because the contenteditable feature is so broken in most browsers. I have filed tickets with Chrome and Firefox.
Publishing's like a muscle, and you make me want to flex.
ePub is just HTML in a glorified wrapper. If you're going to make a work available in ePub then HTML should be a given. However it shouldn't matter at all what tool the author uses to compose his work. Presentation for publication and distribution is the job of editors.
Now whether or not the author wishes to be the editor of their own work is another story. Some want that level of control, and others don't really care.
Also sloppy piss-poor formatting in electronic publications means the editor isn't doing their job. There is more to it than just doing a straight OCR scan or copy-pasta from the source text file. And then they wonder why people don't want to pay as much or even more for an electronic instead of paper edtion. (At least from what I've seen, the guys that work on the paper editions take pride in their work. Doesn't seem so on the e-side. It's like they handed it off to some intern who's task of getting coffee for everyone else is more important.)
I am sorry for the super geeks o nerds or Start Trek lovers out there that have only one nail and everything is a hammer for them, but HTML is SHIT for any serious publishing.
Why? In my Imac right now I see slashdot with 80 words lines!! Hell to read, there is why newspapers use short lines, lost of them, we need to focus our vision and short lines makes possible very fast reading as you could use your visual memory to read a big chunk of info at a time. With long lines you can't, simply because the next line has nothing to do with the last, as it is very far away.
But somewhat this is the standard on Internet. HTML is the format that could do lost of things well, but there are better tools for specific needs.
You need a format that controls how the info is displayed in the screen. This format exist, it is called "PDF", and it is open enough.
HTML5 is great for text. Like, basically, any markup language. If you write a novel or something, you basically just need text with less than a dozen markers for where chapters start and such. Then you send it to your publisher and they'll do their part.
Now if you write something more interesting, then HTML5 isn't the solution, mostly because there aren't any good editors and readers/browsers still don't guarantee you a good result. For stuff that requires DTP, you are better off with PDF today, and probably for a while.
And if you do your own typesetting, and/or if you want a professional look instead of the amateur crap that most word processing software (and most of the cheap DTP programs) generate, nothing beats LaTeX and nothing will in the forseable future.
Actually, thinking about that I need to rephrase:
Yes, HTML5 is great if you're an amateru posting a blog who doesn't care how your shit looks to the reader, because all of the 5 people reading your blog couldn't spot the difference anyway.
If you want to publish a book, if you care about writing and reading at all, if you don't want to contribute to the downfall of civilization, for fucks sake, think about typesetting.
Here's a few starters:
http://www.thebookdesigner.com/2010/01/the-trouble-with-word-processors/
http://oestrem.com/thingstwice/2007/05/latex-vs-word-vs-writer/
http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/110133/visual-comparison-between-latex-and-word-output-hyphenation-typesetting-ligat
Now if only there were a WYSIWYG LaTeX editor for OS X that's as easy to use as Pages - I'd be using it all day.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Actually, once XHTML came out, why do we have HTML being perpetrated at all, instead of switching over completely to XHTML?
Actually, once XHTML came out, why do we have HTML being perpetrated at all, instead of switching over completely to XHTML?
I thought HTML 5 finally was valid XML? And without all the jiggery-pokery of XHTML and different DTD flavors.
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
I definitely think HTML, CSS and JS is the future of publishing. In fact, I'll go ahead and say the transition has already started. If you look at what's happening right now, book sales, magazine and newsprint subscriptions are on the decline in favor of information gathered from the internet. People generally don't like picking up a book to look up some info when Google is readily available and decreases the amount of time required to get said information. Also, writers will not have to learn anything different, there are already WYSIWYG editors for HTML in existence, they only thing that is missing is a standardized CSS file for them to use that creates all the justified columns and what not they require. HTML5 is also very descriptive about it's data when used properly, unlike PDF's generated with a series of images (I really hate reading these on my kindle!). Also when you add javascript to the mix things like those old childrens books with scroll wheels for animations becomes possible again. HTML5, CSS3, and JS will provide much more rich content than what is currently available, not to mention it's an open standard and can work on any device implementing a web browser.
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Good luck getting full justification with HTML 5.
In which browser does CSS text-align: justify fail? This page claims it works in Firefox, Safari, and and Chrome since 1.0 and IE and Opera since 3.x. Could you explain the problem you ran into in more detail? Was the problem that lack of automatic insertion of ­ (which turns into a hyphen at the end of a line) caused rivers of whitespace?