Please see my comments inline

On Wed, Aug 19, 2015 at 2:07 PM, Jan Tosovsky <[email protected]> wrote:

> Dear Carlos,
>
> thanks for your valuable feedback!
>
> On 2015-08-19 Carlos Araya wrote:
> > The main issue for me is that, to my knowledge, there is no open source
> > solution that works with CSS Paged media and its associated generated
> > content) and none of the available commercial solutions is cheap.
>
> I personally take those HTML+CSS processors as temporary 'dead end'
> solution
> which will be (in long term) replaced with regular web browsers.
>

Paged media content may or may not be the same solution than generating
adaptive layouts like epub's multiple renditions.  The purpose of Paged
Media is to generate print-ready layouts... there are books that have been
created with CSS Paged Media (Lea Verou's CSS Secrets comes to mind) and we
can expect more such content in the future

I would not call it a dead end solution just yet.


>
> So I was quite skeptic to CSS paged media (not mature yet, expensive
> processors) ... until I met vivliostyle.js. It brings CSS paged media to
> browsers NOW. To some extent it makes dedicated processors redundant.
>

Thank you for sharing this. I think it's worth taking a look at it but I'd
ask right off the bat what's the browser support for this technology and
what happens when Javascript is not available or we need it to work with
assistive technology?


>
> I don't believe all works in reality as smooth as announced on their page,
> but I like the concept. As it is open source, you can extend it if you find
> some funcionality missing. So instead of patching XSL-FO processors I'd
> rather patched this Javascript library (if I could). It is also temporary
> 'dead end' which will be replaced with regular browsers, but you can
> prepare
> the content in pure CSS standard NOW with minimal risk of further updates
> when browsers will become mature enough.
>

In an ideal world you would be able to get high quality print outuput
directly from your web content without having to use a library at all. But
we're not there yet and, sadly it'll be a long time before we get there
from a publisher and content distributor perspective.

Publishers and other vendors will want DRM to be built into the content
they distribute.  Do we really want EME for content other than video?

That said there's nothing stopping you from hacking Norm's XSLT 2
stylesheets (https://github.com/docbook/xslt20-stylesheets) to generate the
HTML you need to work with vivliostyle :)


>
> Once your content is rendered in a browser, it is quite straight forward to
> convert it into PDF. But to be honest, this conversion IMHO doesn't make
> much sense any more ;-)
>

Why do you see it making no sense?

I personally would still like the option of hard copy reading so I can make
notes and underline the content I read. I would also like the capability to
share the content and the annotations I make without violating the license
to my content.

IF you're interested on the convergence between web, ebook and other
digital content you may want to check the epub+web white paper at:
https://w3c.github.io/epubweb/


> All above shouldn't be taken too seriously. It is just my (naive) view.
>

We all have our opinions about how things should work. It's the sharing of
these opinions that make us grow as a community.

>
> > The final question I'd have before jumping into CSS Paged Media
> > development is for what version of the stylesheets?
>
> While I'd prefer XSLT2, I am afraid this is not acceptable by majority of
> end users.
>
> Jan
>
>
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