29jan2024
Despite decades of advances in document rendering technology, most of the world's documents are stuck in the 1990s due to the limitations of PDF. Yet, modern document formats like HTML have yet to provide a competitive alternative to PDF. This post explores what prevents HTML documents from being portable, and I propose a way forward based on the EPUB format. To demonstrate my ideas, this post is presented using a prototype EPUB reading system
During my work in LitRes (Russia's largest ebook store) we had EPUB as an internal format for storing books in MyBook.RU. The main problem for us was validation: there's just too much things that you can do inside the EPUB, and the validation process was difficult. As a result we came to almost the same decision: we just cut off all the "suspicious" elements from the files and have our "Light EPUB" format.