Help revise the Epub standard

[Nate the great]

In the next month, the EPUB Maintenance working group will complete a minor revision (2.0.1) of the EPUB 2.0 Standard. This corrects errors and inconsistencies and does not change functionality. During this process, many other significant enhancements have been identified that indicates that a need for major revision to EPUB that goes far beyond a maintenance update is needed.

13 current problems

We're 2 days into the 2 weeks set aside for public comments. We have a lot of smart people here at MR, and I know that we can generate useful ideas. I'm going to start a new topic for each of the 13 proposed changes. Let's use this thread as a catch-all discussion for anything not covered by the other 13.

• rich media & interactivity
• enhanced global language support
• enhanced (magazine) article support
• enhanced metadata support
• page-level layouts
• enhanced navigation support
• alignment with broadly-adopted Web standards
• annotation support
• mathematics support
• dictionaries (book-specific semantics)
• accessibility support
• mechanism for adding industry specific extensions
• relationship to approved national and international standards

[DawnFalcon]

Very much needs it's own forum.

[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

Very much needs it's own forum.

No it doesn't! There's a frickin' ePub forum already here! Nate should know this!

And Nate, putting each and every 'problem' into its own thread??? C'mon. If you'd placed them properly in the ePub forum, sure. But here? In General Discussions?!?

Derek

[DawnFalcon]

I don't mean a forum /here/.

[Ankh]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

I don't mean a forum /here/.

But of course you don't. You mean their official IDPF forum, right?

[DawnFalcon]

...It would help, yes. (The IDPF suggest here for general ebook topics, I suggest there for working on their standards)

[pholling]

Though not among the listed 13, I hope that cyber-security is something that gets plenty of attention. That's a necessity for anything that gets downloaded to a programmable device.

[mczajka]

Looking for enhanced table support and the ability to scroll left and right, or some way to not "wrap" table contents to fit the viewer. This is something that MobiPocket could do with their Reader on their portable versioins. This may be more of a function of the viewing software, but is still a problem for many books/documents/annual reports, etc. with tables in them.

[maggotb0y]

One of the things I find frustrating when reading an electronic book is the inability of electronic formats to handle breaks in the text according to where the break falls on the page. In paper books, it is common practice to change the standard double carriage return break to a break with three asterisks (or some other thing, like an image, or a single dot, or a little squiggle) if it falls at the top or bottom of the page. It should be possible to define two different text breaks, one for the middle of a page, and one for if the top/bottom of the page, and allow the rendering engine to calculate the appropriate one to display for each break.