Quote:
Originally Posted by ATDrake
Whether or not ePub has been anointed as a "standard" in your view is irrelevant. It was created to be an open standard interoperable royalty-free format by the IDPF, and is documented as one, such that people know how it should behave and how to implement tools that work with it.
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All that makes it a *specification* not a standard.
There is a difference.
There are dozens of international standard-setting bodies (ISO, ECMA, etc); epub has been certified by none and has been submitted to none. It builds on true standards like HTML and XML but it is not itself a product standard.
More, true standards come with trademarks and certification penalties and enforcement power behind them.
<idpf> control over epub ends once they "flip it over the wall" to implementers, which is why implementers get away with messing with it.
<idpf> doesn't really care about implementation or it wouldn't be looking the other way at what is going on.
That is not how true standards are maintained.