Quote:
Originally Posted by lvicini
1) Is the Kobo standard onboard EPUB reader KePub or ePub reader?
|
Kobo uses two renderers. Adobe's RMSDK which handles epub2 and Adobe's ADEPT DRM. ACCESS's NetFront renderer which is more or less an epub3 compliant renderer.
Quote:
Originally Posted by lvicini
2) I read in Wikipedia that EPUB3 is based on HTML5. Considering that open source HTML5 web browser engines are everywhere, why are there still EPUB2 readers around? It should be easy to make all of them EPUB3 capable.
|
Epub3 is based on HTML5. Unfortunately, I've tested several "epub3" renderers and the results were varied. Some came close to full compliance, other's were not much better than using Adobe's older epub2 only RMSDK to read an epub3 ebook.
You might want to check the support grid at epubtest.org,
BISG EPUB 3 Support Grid. The best epub3 renderers are getting close but still not quite ready for prime time (IMNSHO) especially when you consider that these results are from test files that are epub3 compliant with epubcheck showing no errors. I've run the ~20 "epub3" ebooks I've purchased through epubcheck and none of them made it through error free. Some minor errors but ~33% had issues with the HTML navigation document (replaces the toc.ncx file in epub2 ebooks) while about 50% were epub2 ebooks with an epub3 navigation document.
Most of the errors in the navigation document were hard to understand since the standard is fairly easy to follow. Ordered list, optional header, li elements must contain a <a> or <span> with <a> elements capable of having ordered lists to allow for a contents hierarchy while the <span> elements must be followed by an ordered list. You can make a very complex TOC as in one book of poetry where the ~100 poems were grouped in a 3 level hierarchy or you can make a simple 1 level TOC.
As for the number of HTML5 renderers? Check the test results on those. Even the big names such as Google, Mozilla, Microsoft or Apple still have a ways to go to support HTML5 fully. The last range I saw was from 526 for Chrome 44, 525 for Opera 31 (perhaps using the same Chromium code base helped?), 478 for Firefox 44 (aka Nightly), 453 for Edge 13 and 336 for IE 11 -- out of a possible 555 points.