User created content
sergiompereira opened this issue · 2 comments
I am not sure if this is beyond the scope of your project, but I was thinking about the markup for user created content.
We write notes on the margins of our physical books, underline passages, and even point to other pages in the same book, or to pages in other books related to that one (a sort of hyperlink).
We will still want to do that in digital books. Amazon Kindle enables the reader to do similar things (and even publish them to the cloud). Other solutions based on html5 are showing up, like this one:
http://www.colwiz.com/press/news-3
... but I believe this should become a standard.
As far as I know, there isn't a W3C working group for this issue, but the Html5 specification has defined some features to start from, like the tag for highlighting, and the contentEditable attribute. Is this enough? Of course there is the need for storage, but Web Storage and Web SQL api's could come to the rescue.
Do you believe these features belong just to reader apps, or should any html5 enabled browser provide support for them consistently? In this later case, could your effort help define also the markup of book usage, alongside with the markup of book production?
Thanks for your initiative.
Hi @sergiompereira,
Thanks for getting in touch. These are excellent questions. HTMLBook was conceived as a spec primarily designed to solve the problem of authoring content in XHTML5, so I've been considering specifications related to reader-specific functionality (like highlighting and adding annotations) to be out of scope at present.
On the reader side, however, the IDPF (International Digital Publishing Forum), who maintains the EPUB specification, has an Open Annotations in EPUB working group designed to tackle these very issues. Also, the W3C has an Open Annotation Community Group (http://www.w3.org/community/openannotation/).
We certainly plan to stay up to speed on developments made by these groups around user-created content, and would potentially consider additions to the HTMLBook spec in this area if relevant to authoring needs.
Best,
Sanders
Hi @sandersk,
Thank you for guiding me to those two community groups. I will check them out.
Wish you the best for your project here on github!
Sérgio