Quote:
Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward
I like HTML because it is open-source, commonly used, and therefore isn't going to go away.
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HTML is nice because a lot of people are familiar with it. HTML is not nice for eBooks for a few reasons, though, and if I had to pick a format to back I'd go with ePub.
First HTML is a royal pain to parse, because of its SGML roots. You'll notice that ePub wisely chose XHTML (and DTBOOK) as the basis of their standards. XHTML is nice, because it's XML, and there's dozens of tools out there for parsing and processing XML.
EPub also uses the open Dublin Core metadata standard for storing metadata about an eBook, whereas there is no real standardized way for inserting things like authors, user ratings, or copyright information into an HTML file.
EPub eliminates the XHTML "script" tag. This makes a lot of sense too, as there's really no need for JavaScript in an eBook. I suppose one could make some sort of argument that JavaScript could be used to produce some cool interactive content in an eBook, but since most current generation eBooks have no mouse or keyboard, it would be difficult to have a consistent interaction mechanism.
Finally, ePub IS an open standard. The whole standard is documented in detail at openebook.org.
If I had one complaint about ePub it is that they've included DRM support in this latest iteration of the standard, and I think that's a mistake. Mind you, lots of vendors seem to be getting behind the ePub standard, and I'm sure the inclusion of DRM is part of that movement. The standard at least lays out how to tell if a book is DRMed or not, which is better than leaving DRM support out and having companies come up with their own proprietary extensions to the format, which would be a nightmare for developers.