Why the web
should take a look
at eBooks

Parental Advisory, explicit lyrics

Note

Those slides have been extended so that they can serve as a starter kit.

Further details are simply provided and do not alter what’s been said during my talk.

(Source: https://github.com/JayPanoz/pw2016-en)

Fake Oh Really cover which title is: Breaking Reading Systems, the definitive guide, by Jiminy Panoz

Documents ?

Apple News Google Amp FaceBook Instant Articles
Wikipedia

DPUB IG + IDPF = ?

Our culture

┻━┻︵ \(°□°)/ ︵ ┻━┻

We didn’t learn anything from the web

✅ Unsemantic tag soup


  LES NUITS MEXICAINES


				   


  I
 LAS CUMBRES


				   


Nulle contrée au monde n'offre, aux regards éblouis des voyageurs, de plus charmants paysages que le Mexique; entre tous, celui de las Cumbres ou des cimes est sans contredit un des plus saisissants et des plus gracieusement accidentés.

✅ Fixed layout

Some popular DTP app’s fixed-layout export


  
This book

Which translates to…

This book

✅ Fragmentation

✅ Proprietary formats and tools︎

✅ Made for [insert platform]

It works on iBooks but we didn’t anticipate Apple would release iBooks on OS X so sorry folks, some features will only work on iOS.

(The previous popup says that some interactions might not work with a mouse or a trackpad because the book was made for iBooks on iOS.)

✅ Quite a few brutal specs

✅ IE 6

Adobe Reader Mobile SDK

eBook Dev ?

  • 2475 Github repos
  • 2 active frameworks
  • Where’s Waldo’s contributions
  • DIY Dev Tools and docs

Here comes the stuff you might find interesting…

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

CSS Multi-column Layout Module

To achieve pagination, some Reading Systems use columns.

http://www.idpf.org/epub/31/spec/epub-contentdocs.html#sec-css-content-conf

Note

Keep in mind that some Reading Systems will not support all desired features of CSS. In particular, the following are known to be problematic:

  • Reading System-induced pagination can interact poorly with style sheets. Pagination is sometimes done using columns, which can result in incorrect values for viewport sizes. Fixed and absolute positioning are particularly problematic.
  • Some types of screens will not support animations and transitions.

Container Queries…

CSS Figures

Opera in Reader Mode, with an image floating on top-right and a 2-column span.

Opera Reader, late 2011

@media -o-paged {
  html { 
    height: 100%;
    overflow: -o-paged-x;
  }
  article { 
    overflow: -o-paged-x-controls;
    columns: 25em;
  }
  figure {
    column-span: -o-integer(2);
    float: -o-top-corner;
  }
}

http://people.opera.com/howcome/2011/reader/

Links for thought

Latin Text Layout and Pagination

It’s also about typography e.g. drop caps, generated content declared on elements directly, or text aligned on characters
  • Grids
  • Regions 2.0
  • Baseline
  • OpenType features
  • Font Metric API (Houdini)

Links for thought

Portable Web Publications

The concept is all about packaging resources into a publication which can be read online or offline
  • Archives
  • Semantic inflections
  • Resources’ relationships
  • Annotations
  • User settings

One remark about user settings…

http://www.idpf.org/epub/31/spec/epub-contentdocs.html#sec-css-rs-overrides

4.5 Reading System Overrides

EPUB Reading Systems should apply Author style sheets as written to EPUB Content Documents. If a Reading System allows, Users should be able to override Author style sheets as desired. EPUB Reading Systems should not override Author style sheets unless strictly necessary.

If a Reading System has to override an Author style sheet, it should do so in a way that preserves the Cascade: through a user agent style sheet, the getOverrideStyle method [DOM2 Style], or [HTML] style attributes.

Developers of Reading Systems are strongly encouraged to publicly document their user agent style sheets and how they interact with Author style sheets.

In a way that preserves the cascade…

*, * *, *[class], *[class] *[class] {
  prop: value !important;
}

https://github.com/FriendsOfEpub/WillThatBeOverriden

Links for thought

Millions and millions
of PDF files online

(80% of non-HTML documents)

\,,/ (^_^) \,,/

We have not finished with documents yet.

Who’s who

People you should follow…

Jiminy Panoz