Interesting article!
Some sentences could be made clearer for the non-specialist, though.
It could also be interesting to add other formats like the Russian fb2 to this analysis.
A big question for me (and an interesting test for all those formats) is which format allows the use of these free off-line versions of Wikipedia available in many languages there:
http://pinguinburg.de/wpmp
Right now they are available in mobipocket format, but most e-reader devices cannot use them because the closed-source mobipocket software reader does not handle links between several files.
The open source FBReader cannot do anything with those files for two reasons:
- it absolutely wants to load the entire book in memory (imagine a 1 GB Wikipedia file in the memory of one of our favorite devices!
- like the official mobipocket software reader, it does not allow links between several files, and those freely downloadable Wikipedia files come in the following form: a zip file decompressed into a directory containing a master index file, and the hundreds of thousands of Wikipedia articles are contained in a few dozen files.
Could epub do better? Should the epub standard be rewritten to be able to handle Wikipedia?
Could fb2 do it?