Quote:
Originally Posted by Ansileran
@fjtorres
Your link is unavailable here (in France)...
So what you are actually saying is that epub3lite makes sense for most readers (6", fiction) but you'd need epub3 for specific purposes and dedicated devices. Isn't that exactly what the point of epub3lite is?
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Sorry.
It's not on Youtube and I'm pretty sure the clip on Hulu is not accessible everywhere.
Try a web search for: shimmer floor wax saturday night live
In the meantime, here's a transcript:
http://snltranscripts.jt.org/75/75ishimmer.phtml
What I'm saying is that it doesn't make sense to jam together specifications for two very different products into one. The result is going to be suboptimal for both. epub3 as published was a bad idea from the start.
The reality we are seeing is that the epub3 stakeholders, the people whose livelihood depends in some measure on commercial ebooks not sold by Amazon, have found the existing epub3 specification too unwieldy to fully implement and have been implementing those features that make sense for *their* customers. If MathML isn't in there, well, that tells you what *they* think of it. It doesn't make sense to *them*.
What any specific customer needs or wishes to see isn't really factoring into it; if you look at the list of stakeholders listed by the AAP, they don't see readers or writers as stakeholders, only the middlemen.
epub3lite (or whatever they call it in the end) is an attempt to coordinate so that all the stakeholders doing partial epub3 implementations support the same sub-set the same way and deprecate the same features. They need a spec that will let them go make money (like Amazon and Apple are) instead of waiting for a gold-plated religious symbol of standardization to magically appear.
The full spec has been out for two years without being implemented, and the AAP crowd obviously think it won't be implemented within the next year if they don't trim out the bloat and get *something* out there. Especially since that is what proprietary format vendors like Apple and Amazon did to create *their* rich content ebook formats in a timely fashion. Amazon got the job done in six months so, unless their software developers are way better than everybody else's, the failure of epub3 to materialize lies in the spec's attempt to be everything to all people and feature triage is the only option left to them.
In the tech world, decades of product design successes and failures have shown that letting marketting types write the specs for products leads to failure every time. That is why the techie mantra is K.I.S.S. - "Keep it Simple, Stupid". The proper, time-proven solution isn't kitchen sink specs; it is market segmentation. Different products, each optimized for its intended mission and audience.
Textbooks and technical papers *are* different from narrative text and cookbooks. Two different products selling at vastly different prices to very different buyers. So why commingle the two?
Might as well try to sell a floor wax that is also a desert topping.