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."

Comments

Obligatory answer:

[Anonymous Coward]

No.

Re:Obligatory answer:

[gigaherz]

"Is HTML5 the future of ?" NO. If HTML is ever the future of anything, it will most probably be a later version, not 5.

In my opinion, HTML as we know it isn't fit for any truly serious work. The current model based on HTML, CSS and JavaScript is too clunky. Ideally, we would need a new content description (modelling) language, that's better designed at describing the content we want to see on the future of the "web", instead of it all being a hack around vertically-scrolling pages. We would need a new presentation language, that's better fit to describe to the User Agent how that content is supposed to look like, and either a much improved version of the scripting language, or a whole new language that's better fit to interact with both the content sources (model), and the presentation patterns (views).

I will list a few of the flaws I can't stand about the HTML model, roughly in order of how simple the concept is:

• You can't vertically-align objects without scripting.
• You can't define a horizontal-scrolling element without scripting.
• You can't define a non-scripted grid-like layout with proportional, fixed and content-dependant sizes mixed together.
• It lacks a simple, integrated, templating and data-binding system.

I will stop here since I'm apparently thinking of WPF too much.

Re:Obligatory answer:

[Anonymous Coward]

"Is HTML5 the future of ?" NO. If HTML is ever the future of anything, it will most probably be a later version, not 5.

In my opinion, HTML as we know it isn't fit for any truly serious work. The current model based on HTML, CSS and JavaScript is too clunky. Ideally, we would need a new content description (modelling) language, that's better designed at describing the content we want to see on the future of the "web", instead of it all being a hack around vertically-scrolling pages. We would need a new presentation language, that's better fit to describe to the User Agent how that content is supposed to look like, and either a much improved version of the scripting language, or a whole new language that's better fit to interact with both the content sources (model), and the presentation patterns (views).

I will list a few of the flaws I can't stand about the HTML model, roughly in order of how simple the concept is:

• You can't vertically-align objects without scripting.
• You can't define a horizontal-scrolling element without scripting.
• You can't define a non-scripted grid-like layout with proportional, fixed and content-dependant sizes mixed together.
• It lacks a simple, integrated, templating and data-binding system.

I will stop here since I'm apparently thinking of WPF too much.

Very little of what you typed is true so it must be mentioned that your CSS is really out of date if you haven't heard of these items.

Review these for your points because they don't rely on scripting, you are selling things short.
vertical-align:middle - CSS, aligns vertically - http://www.w3.org/wiki/CSS/Properties/vertical-align
overflow:auto - CSS, creates scrollbars http://www.w3.org/TR/css-overflow-3/#overflow-properties
float:left + width:30% with font-size:15px inside, float:left + width:30%,float:left + width:30% - 3 column layout in CSS with fixed font inside and content dependent bounding boxes - also see the whole basis of responsive design
The developer creates a "simple, integrated, templating and data-binding system" or does everyone forget that the world doesn't revolve around picking up a bloated framework and claim to be a developer. Sigh, so many posers exist in this field. For every 300 designers seeking another "framework", I meet one real developer who read the specifications instead of waiting for someone to make an article about CSS in a blog post. I'll bet you don't even use SVG, or lift :)

Re:Obligatory answer:

[YttriumOxide]

I completely agree. Having just published my first book (see my sig), I didn't spend any time considering the design/layout/etc until right near the end. The content is what was important to me, so I wrote that first. Once I was done with the content, THEN I laid it out, made it look "like I feel it should look", and produced a PDF which ultimately got printed to paper.

For the eBook version, I used RTF which was then converted to the appropriate format (mobi) by the publisher. But again, it was a 'last step' thing, as the content is what I spent my time on.

Re:Obligatory answer:

[Kielistic]

You should probably be aware that ePub is basically a zipped HTML document.

Almost nothing supports CSS3 paged media yet

[tepples]

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.

Re:Almost nothing supports CSS3 paged media yet

[nabsltd]

HTML5 is a terrible source format because it is predominantly a visual markup, not a semantic one.

Actually, HTML elements in ePub have defined semantic roles, primarily to allow assistive technologies to make better use of the content.

I don't think so...

[djupedal]

I'm living large with XML'd e-pubs, but I do use a bit of HTML5 storage in a few of my apps.

Re:Not really

[Chrisq]

Unless the two dominant sources of e-books (Amazon and Apple) support it: no.

That would be a yes then:

Amazon infuses e-books with HTML5 power with new KF8 format
It’s Official: iBooks Now Supports Epub3 which is based on XHTML1.1 which introduced html5 features to XHTML

Re:yes, but

[nabsltd]

If you write a novel or something, you basically just need text with less than a dozen markers for where chapters start and such.

There are very few novels that don't use some sort of alternate text (italics, bold, etc.), so that has to be noted in some way.

Then, you have structures like in-chapter breaks, first paragraph differences, date/location notations, chapter name/number, etc., where it's very likely an author has an strong idea for what the final result should look like. At the extreme end, you have novels like The Andromeda Strain which is as complex in specific formatting requirements as a math textbook.

The primary difference today is that authors have many tools available that allow them to convey the desired look and feel to the publisher. And, for that, HTML is a lot more tedious than a WYSIWYG word processor. Someday, someone is going to write a WYSIWYG word processor that can output high-quality, compact HTML plus CSS, but none of those exist right now.