Andreas wrote (was this intended to be a private reply?): > this looks like a very interesting and promising project. It also > sounds very ambitious!
Yes, I guess it is ambitious. But having been involved with the Open eBook Publication Structure Working Group since 1999 (which authored OEBPS 1.0, 1.0.1 and 1.2), I'm used to ambitious projects. Coming up with the OpenReader Format (half of what we want to do, the other half is to build a reference implementation user agent or "browser") should be easier than building OEBPS. > Are you building on existing OS projects (such as Mozilla/Firefox) > to build your reader or do you implement from scratch? The long-term goal is to spur the development of independent OpenReader user agents (or "browsers"), just like today where there's several competing web browsers for just about every computer platform under the sun. We do want to build a reference implementation(s), though, to run on the more important platforms in order to get the OpenReader format embraced and just as importantly to establish user agent conformance requirements. We haven't decided yet whether we want to build the RI from "scratch" (which is not an accurate word, we'd still use as many modules as we can and sew them together), or to build most of it from an existing codebase, such as the Mozilla/Firefox codebase. It could even be a combination. Anyone reading this who has ideas in this area is invited to join the 'openreader-devel' discussion group and propose them. Of course, if the Mozilla/Firefox people want to take the lead and build an OR implementation (such as a plugin module for Firefox), that'd be great! > Do you have any details what SVG version you are targetting? Do you > plan to add scripting and animation support? I see that SMIL 2.0 is > targeted for the third major release. With regards to SVG, we have yet to decide. We definitely need a few SVG experts to help both the OpenReader Format and Development groups with regards to SVG support. We are also reaching out to the MathML folk (and we have some contacts there as well.) There is the issue of fallbacks if islands of SVG and MathML are included in any documents. That is, the publisher could provide alternatives to SVG and MathML islands, such as raster images of the objects. This way, limited hardware which cannot support SVG and MathML (someday this will be a non-issue as even the most humble computing devices get powerful) can latch on to the fallback images and display them instead. > at http://www.openreader.org/features-table.html I don't find any > hint on scripting support - is that deliberately omitted? In my > opinion scripting important is very important for e-books when it > comes to interactive elearning examples. Good point. > I can fully understand though, that you want to introduce SVG step > by step, going from static to dynamic. After all, it is a huge > specification and probably a lot of work to implement. When it comes > to a decision on whether to implement SMIL or Scripting I would > rather prefer scripting. Scripting is more important than SMIL to > build interactive applications and one could simulate many SMIL > constructs by scripting. As we study OpenReader more and more, it becomes clear that we should not bite off more than we can chew (unlike OEBPS, which tried to tackle it all and failed in a few areas). So if you refer to the "features" table (which is getting a little dated), you'll see that OpenReader is not planned to support any animation/multimedia in the first version. The same obviously applies to SMIL/script support. Since accessibility is important in OpenReader, we definitely need to eventually support SMIL/scripting. The DAISY folk have been consulted already with OpenReader, and I expect they will contribute to the building of the OR Format Specification. (I think the DAISY folk will prefer SMIL because they are familiar with it, but we definitely should take a fresh look at the SMIL vs. Scripting issue.) Jon Noring OpenReader Consortium ----- To unsubscribe send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -or- visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers and click "edit my membership" ---- Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
