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Old 02-10-2019, 06:00 PM   #55
maximus83
Nameless Being
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by murraypaul View Post
That rather ignores the observed reality that MOBI and its derived formats have achieved widespread adoption, wider then ePub.
You're equivocating on the meaning of 'standard' and not using it the way I was. I do not mean an informal, de facto standard as in 'what is most commonly used by consumers.' I mean a formal standard that is a written specification, that can be adhered to (or not), is followed by a large number of publishers, and can be used to evaluate artifacts. The only thing close to a cross-industry standard I'm aware of in ebooks right now is epub, though I'm interested to hear if there are others.

Quote:
Originally Posted by murraypaul View Post
Endorsed also seems a little strong for what appears to be a rather slanted working draft that doesn't appear to be linked from its parent page, and the number of spelling mistakes doesn't inspire confidence.
Agreed, it's not a finalized standard yet. But that's not unusual, many of the W3 standards can be in 'draft' status for years, even as many companies and organizations adopt and adhere to them. In fact HTML and XHTML before it worked like that, until HTML5 finally became the locked-down standard. You, and every other web user on the planet, BENEFITED directly from the development of those standards, as the leading browser developers gradually over time got to support increasingly 'standard' HTML, so you could visit any web page and things would render more or less the same. EPUB is under consideration, which is why it's hosted on their W3 site as a standards draft, and it's why they have a working group working on it with industry publishing organizations like the IDPF and the many publishing companies that are using it. There is no other ebook format that has any cross-industry working group committed to defining standards other than epub. Their current working draft on 3.2 is here: https://w3c.github.io/publ-epub-revi...epub-spec.html. If I were a publishing company putting out content today, or a software developer building tools and apps, I would absolutely support epub 3.2 format and be well aware of how the W3 working group is developing the standard.

Quote:
Originally Posted by murraypaul View Post
I don't have any particular interest in what a web standards body says about my eBooks,
I can see that.

Quote:
Originally Posted by murraypaul View Post
In an alternate universe a semantic-based format like TEI would have predominated, but we are were we are.
Agreed that HTML has limited semantics, but complex schemas like DocBook, TEI, DITA, etc, are unlikely to ever gain much traction as ebook publishing standards. First of all, there's a distinction between what you use as your authoring format, and what you use as your publishing format. You could conceivably author in any schema you want, including TEI, but still publish in an output format such as HTML, PDF, or EPUB. My company does this very thing. Secondly, the complex schemas like TEI, though they have their place in some specialized usage especially academic types of content, are unlikely to ever be standardized as a universal authoring scheme due to the complexity and cost of doing the authoring itself, and of creating tools to author, validate, transform, and publish the validated source into various formats. My company (a software company whose software everybody here has used) publishes tens of thousands of technical documents a year, and we went through a whole research effort recently to update our authoring format. We looked at everything, including DITA for our authoring markup schema, and in the end we concluded the industry as a whole is moving away from heavy markup schemes, and more toward markdown. In fact, we author technical source content in markdown, and then transform and publish to the web as HTML5. By analogy, I expect most ebook publishing will not embrace complex markup schemes as 'standard' for authoring the source content--except within specialized niche organizations such as academic ones. But I do think there will be continued effort around standardization of the OUTPUT formats--such as epub. But clearly, companies like Amazon do not see the larger picture and will not be helping with such efforts.

Last edited by maximus83; 02-10-2019 at 06:10 PM.
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