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this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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I'd setup a working group to invent something new. Many of our current formats are stuck in the past, e.g. PDF or ODF are still emulating paper, even so everybody keeps reading them on a screen. What I want to see is a standard document format that is build for the modern day Internet, with editing and publishing in mind. HTML ain't it, as that can't handle editing well or long form documents, EPUB isn't supported by browsers, Markdown lacks a lot of features, etc. And than you have things like Google Docs, which are Internet aware, editable, shareable, but also completely proprietary and lock you into the Google ecosystem.
https://xkcd.com/927/
So you want EPUB support in browser and you have the ultimate document file format?
It would solve the long-form document problem. It wouldn't help with the editing however. The problem with HTML as it is today, is that it has long left it's document-markup roots and turned into an app development platform, making it not really suitable for plain old documents. You'd need to cut it down to a subset of features that are necessary for documents (e.g. no Javascript), similar to how PDF/A removes features from PDF to create a more reliable and future proof format.
Weasyprint kinda is that, except that it's meant to be rendered to PDF.
Can you explain why you need browser support for epub?
EPubs are just websites bound in xhtml or something. Could we just not make every browser also an epub reader? (I just like epubs).
They're basically zip files with a standardized metadata file to determine chapter order, index page, … and every chapter is a html file.
That's the idea, and while at it, we could also make
.zipfiles a proper Web technology with browser support. At the moment ePub exists in this weird twilight where it is build out of mostly Web technology, yet isn't actually part of the Web. Everything being packed into.zipfiles also means that you can't link directly to the individual pages within an ePub, as HTTP doesn't know how to unpack them. It's all weird and messy and surprising that nobody has cleaned it all up and integrated it into the Web properly.So far the original Microsoft Edge is the only browser I am aware of with native ePub support, but even that didn't survive when they switched to Chrome's Bink.
Microsoft Edge's ePub reader was so good! I would have used it all the time for reading if it hadn't met its demise. Is there no equivalent fork or project out there? The existing epub readers always have these quirks that annoy me to the point where I'll just use Calibre's built in reader which works well enough.