

IBooks Author analysis by the co-chairman of the CSS Working Group - tbassetto
http://www.glazman.org/weblog/dotclear/index.php?post/2012/01/20/iBooks-Author-a-nice-tool-but

======
doe88
Seriously I don't see the problem. Ok maybe it's just my scripting/developer
side speaking or maybe it's because I'm never expecting that much openness
from Apple.

But if I were a publisher and I wanted to make a nice book, I would either do
the following: if I already had a good authoring tool I would use it for any
of the distributed platforms and if I didn't have any authoring tool and the
one proposed by Apple was appealing to me but I wanted to remain portable
accross platforms I would keep the form and content completely separated (as
css is meant to html) and use the Apple tools to create a good format for the
Apple platform and use something else for others platforms.

I think the problem is not about standards or anything else, I think the
problem is that we can't accept that a company creating so many appealing
tools always put so much burden and restrictions in their use. Especially in
this case where the tool is 'free' but has a very restrictive license. But as
everything else, anyone is free to make a better product or an equivalent
product with a better license, this is competition, this is good.

------
SquareWheel
Apple is not a friend to the standards world. Remember Facetime, and how that
was supposed to become an open standard? They are not as dangerous as
Microsoft, but they had an opportunity to really do good here, and they missed
it in favor of lock-in.

~~~
lurch_mojoff
I disagree that Apple's goal was lock-in. If it was, they'd probably make the
interactive textbooks iOS applications, similar to what PushPopPress did,
instead of this bastardized version of epub.

Quotes from the linked post like this: _"The ability to control the size of
each column and column gap was recently discussed in the CSS WG. The Group
decided that allowing setting of individual column width and column gap width
is not a feature considered for the first REC of this document."_ , suggest,
to me at least, that Apple created their proprietary format because standards
didn't and still don't cover the fictionality they have in mind for these
interactive books. I'd rather Apple do that than hastily muscle their
implementation into the standards.

~~~
Turing_Machine
Yes, it sounds like almost all of these features were proposed (and rejected)
by the committee (I'm assuming here that 'fictionality' is a thinko for
'functionality' :-).

The settings for column width and column gap width, in particular, sound like
they'd be critical for making a really attractive ebook. If the epub 3
standard doesn't support such basic functionality, there's a problem.

This isn't quite the same as the stuff Microsoft pulled -- MS created tools
that claimed to generate "HTML" (but which in reality only worked in Internet
Explorer) and encouraged their use on the public web. Apple isn't claiming
these things are ePub 3 (or any other standard format), and in fact they're
explicitly forbidding their use in a generic context. I'm not a fan of their
licensing restrictions, but at least they're not claiming (or even implying)
in any way that these ebooks are standards-based.

------
lambada
A fascinating read. The CSS extensions themselves don't bother me - we've seen
it before from all the major web browsers, the fact that they are unprefixed
though does bother me.

And this greatly clarifies whether the format is ePub or not.

