Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
Because all the stuff needed to make ePub 4 would be done by sane people instead of the insane committee that created ePub 3. Well, maybe not fully sane people, but sane enough when it comes to eBook features. And no company such as Apple will be allowed to submit suggestions or bribe anyone. And finally, no features would be added that would not work on an eInk Reader that was of a certain specification. So that would remove audio and video for sure.
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I don't think the EPUB 3 folks were insane. Adding audio, video, etc. are very useful for interactive textbooks, which was the main goal of EPUB 3. It isn't useful for fiction, obviously, but you don't have to use all those features if you don't want them.
My biggest problem with EPUB 3 is that they didn't fully make it backwards compatible with EPUB 2, in that it isn't possible to provide a set of metadata that is guaranteed to be fully functional with both EPUB 3 and EPUB 2 readers, thanks to reuse of certain elements in entirely different ways (the HTML TOC being the big one, IIRC). That's a very Apple-like mentality (no need to support hardware more than three years old), and I think it was a mistake.
And there are significant accessibility issues with EPUB 3 video. (For example, there's fallback content for readers that can't show video, but the spec says that this isn't intended as an accessibility solution, and provides no suggestions for alternatives that would adequately serve blind or deaf readers.)
Basically, it seems like a sloppy specification in many ways, rushed out in an effort to create a standard that could be suitable for electronic textbooks, only to be ignored by Apple in the end, replaced by a proprietary standard that is only partially based on the spec. That's what I don't like about EPUB 3.