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

Yes, HTML5 is the future of publishing

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Yes, HTML5 is the future of publishing

[catmistake]

I disagree, strongly. There is nothing wrong with HTML5. The issue is that it is a non-issue . In physical publishing, the industry has long adopted PDF. It is ideal for printing. PDF is here for the forseeable future. If your book is being pressed, it doesn't matter if it was previously Word, LaTeX, HTML5, chiseled in granite, or you used your finger on a sandy beach and made molds with plaster; it's going to be normalized as PDF before it hits the press.

For digital distribution there is room for all formats, and new formats no one has thought up... there is no purpose in even talking about this. Compose how you feel most comfortable; if physically publishing, send your content to the printers in any form you wish, they will normalize to PDF; make any format available that the digital consumer desires -- the cost of multiple formats is negligible... I imagine a perl or python or ruby script conversion for each format desired is all that is necessary, perhaps with some proofing to iron out wrinkles.

Enjoy your preferred method of composition. But as I pleaded above, please stop evangelizing the need for a solution where no problem exists. HTML5 is not the One True Format, and all others despair in their inferiority. Give consumers the choice of all or any that they wish to use.

Re:Almost nothing supports CSS3 paged media yet

[dgatwood]

HTML5 is actually an excellent source format for producing paginated content ...

Which is actually completely untrue. HTML5 is a terrible source format because it is predominantly a visual markup, not a semantic one. You can sort of graft semantics onto it through CSS classes, but any such solution is inherently fragile and at the very least a publisher-specific standard, and likely a book-specific standard.

DocBook is an excellent source format. Its tags are semantic by their nature, which makes it much better as a source format, because it can not only be trivially converted to HTML5 for electronic publication, but also to LaTeX for print publication. It will also be easy to convert from that to whatever format replaces HTML5 ten years from now. And of course you can always add additional semantic tags to extend it if you need some book-specific or publisher-specific functionality.

Re:Obligatory answer:

[nabsltd]

Because it is a mistake.

Slashdot is using a <ul> as the basis for their dropdown menus, and for that they don't want any markers. Unfortunately, they seem to have added "list-style: none;" to selectors for all <li> elements.