Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
Are you serious that ePub 3 is going to remove the external ToC in favor of an internal ToC? If so, that's going backwards, not forwards.
|
It'll allow books to have different types of ToC, i.e. one for the chapters, one for a list of illustrations, one for a list of tables, etc. (you could probably also use it to provide an index). It'll provide a lot more flexibility that'll be useful for non-fiction especially.
The old NCX can be maintained as well for older systems, though all the new html5 and mathml tags mean that compatibility is going to be a wider issue. In theory the switch elements defined for ePub 2 will allow backwards-compatibility, but it remains to be seen whether generating tools will support this properly and whether publishers will take the time to format the text in different ways for different systems.