Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
But the larger question is whether ePub will really become a dominant end-user format. Lower end devices like handhelds may not have the processing power to really handle ePub.
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But the definition of a low end device is a movable feast. Ten years ago, a Palm III with 2Mb of RAM and a 16MHz Dragonball (a 68000 series microprocessor) was more or less state of the art. Today? An iPhone has a 626MHz StrongARM family chip, IIRC, and Intel's pushing the Atom family -- basically a low-power embedded IA32 architecture CPU that scales up to dual cores at 1.2GHz -- at the next generation.
ePub has only been out for about 12 months. If it's to be a stable file format, it's going to be around (modulo some tweaking) for more like 10-20 years. (Look at Postscript or PDF or HTML.)
In ten years time, the workload of rendering ePub will look trivial.