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Is HTML5 the Future of Book Authorship?

Posted by samzenpus on from the forget-the-paper dept.

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."

6 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. Obligatory answer: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    No.

    1. Re:Obligatory answer: by gigaherz · · Score: 2, Informative

      "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.

    2. Re:Obligatory answer: by Kielistic · · Score: 3, Informative

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

  2. Almost nothing supports CSS3 paged media yet by tepples · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Almost nothing supports CSS3 paged media yet by nabsltd · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

  3. Re:Not really by Chrisq · · Score: 3, Informative

    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