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

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.

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:Obligatory answer:

[Kielistic]

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