dauwhe

As the world changes rapidly around us, we hope that you are safe and able to enjoy the rejuvenation of ebooks in a responsible way. As co-chairs of the EPUB 3 Community Group, we are focused on protecting the health and wellbeing of not only community group members but of the entire ebook community. 

In these unprecedented times, our thoughts are with everyone personally affected by the spread of COVID-19 and we are grateful for the medical staff working on the frontlines.

As many of us operate from home, we’re also focused on being here for you. We’re working hard to continue to be your resource for information and inspiration. Our email address is public, and we are still accepting issues on GitHub. 

If you need a dose of EPUB stoke, check out the W3C blog, and Dave's irreverent but informative Twitter channel. Or just say hi to us on social.

As ebook developers, we know things can go sideways fast, but it’s how we respond that makes all the difference. Right now, our ability to adapt and truly be ther

dauwhe

Are Web Standards Toast?

I find myself in a tempest in a toaster. Yesterday I (and much of the web standards world) learned about two possible new HTML elements proposed by Google, std-toast and std-switch. I had no idea what “toast” meant in the context of the web, a problem shared my many other people. It turns out it’s a UI pattern, those little notices that pop up and then disappear without user interaction.

But wow, new HTML elements! This is the holy grail. In my part of the web we don’t even dream about new HTML elements. Oh, we’ve tried, but Hixie didn’t much care for footnote, WICG didn’t much care for list titles, and no one much cared about author. Just last week the author of the extensible web manifesto warned me to never expect new HTML elements, due to the difficulty of changing the parser.

But my concern wasn’t so much about the nature of the new elements, but of how we learned about them and what that says about how web standardization works. My [first tweet](https://twitter.com

dauwhe

• A web publication is not just a collection of links. The table of contents is not the book.

• The act of publishing involves obtaining resources and organizing them into a publication, which must be "manifested" (in the FRBR sense) by having files on a server.

• A publication has a publisher. A web publication has an origin. The nature and identity of the publication is determined by the publisher.

• A portable web publication remembers its origin. It knows from whence it came.

• A copy of a publication maintains its internal structure, so that references relative to the publication are stable.