The landscape for CSS regionshttp://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-regions/ has changed drastically since the last time I visited the technology. Since the last posthttps://publishing-project.rivendellweb.net/css-regions-exclusions-shapes-and-new-publishing-paradigms/ about the technology published in October, 2013 the following events took place: - Google, citing concerns about performance, withdrew region support from the Blink rendering engine Cnet posted an article about thishttp://www.cnet.com/news/reversing-course-google-rejects-adobe-web-publishing-tech/ - Mozilla split some aspects of the CSS regions specification into another specificationhttp://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-overflow/ which they believe satisfies the use cases put forward by CSS Regions in a way that our team can support in a much more secure, reliable, and performant manner. - L. Dave Baron opposed regions...
CSS Shapes spechttp://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-shapes/ allow you a finer grained control of how you flow the text around shapes and images. Only Chrome and Opera both using the Blink rendering engine and the beta version of Safari iOS 8 and OS X 10.10 support css shapes. To illustrate the idea of shapes, look at the following image, taken from Sara Souedan's A List Apart article: !Examples of CSS Shapes//alistapart.com/d/394/shape-outside-example.jpg Look at the way the list of ingredients on the second and third recipes. That effect is achieved with shapes. The HTML is fairly simple, we create the shape by placing the element...
In creating ebooks we need to pay attention to files size... Modern fonts have many more characters than we use in normal books. Subsetting the fonts will allow us to decrease the size of the font by decreasing the number of glyphs and the the number of languages supported by the font in question. Although for me the primary reason for subseting my fonts is reducing the overall book size, there are other reasons for doing so. Some foundry's require subsetting and font obfuscation as part of their license for eBook embedding. This makes the font less appealing for would-be...
There are two new @rules in CSS well, they may not be new but they are new to me that open an awesome set of possibilities for CSS development with or without a pre-processor. @namespace CSS namespaceshttps://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@namespace are the CSS implementation of XML namespaceshttp://www.w3.org/TR/xml-names11/; the technology that allows elements from different XML vocabularies to live in the same document. In the case of CSS, namespaces allow us to style elements with the same name from different vocabularies differently. For example, let's look at the a from both XHTML and SVG vocabularies css @namespace urlhttp://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml; @namespace svg urlhttp://www.w3.org/2000/svg; / This matches...
After creating all the content for an ebook there is still more work to do and I can't always remember the exact commands to run to finish the book. I do remember that I have to do the following: - Delete the existing version of the book if any to make sure that changes are picked up in the final product - Delete all .DS\Store directories created in my Mac. This may not always be necessary but avoids epubcheck errors if you forget to remove the directory from one of the files being compressed - Zip all files to the...
Ever since I wrote my original research on paged mediahttps://publishing-project.rivendellweb.net/css-paged-media/ the specs have changed considerably. Here's an update based on the following specifications: - CSS Paged Media Level 3http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-page/ Working Draft from 3/14/13 - CSS Generated Content for Paged Media Modulehttp://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-gcpm/propdef-footnote-policy editor draft from 8/7/14 - Antenna House Formatter Online Manualhttp://antennahouse.com/XSLsample/help/V62/AHFormatterV62.en.pdf downloaded 8/17/14 - Prince XML User Guidehttp://www.princexml.com/doc/9.0/ last accessed 8/17/14 I've also tailored the project to work with Antenna House Formatter and Prince XML. Some of the idiosyncracies will come up while developing the stylesheet for this project. HTML to be used in these examples The basic HTML file...
HTML is the final product In researching the technologies and tools that I use when developing digital content I've come across multiple discussions about what's the best way to create HTML for X application ebooks, web, transforming into other formats and any number of ideas. Some people think that HTML is perfect for everyone to write, regardless of experience and comfort with the technology. We forget that HTML now is very different to HTML as it was originally created. > HTML —which is short for HyperText Markup Language— is the official language of the World Wide Web and was first...
Epubcheck 4 is in the horizon, you should take another look at your books. ePubcheck 4, the IDPF validator is currently in Alpha and available for download if you want test it. I downloaded it and made a first pass to what I thought was a valid book and was, not so pleasantly, surprised at how much it has changed. I say not so pleasantly surprised because of the additonal breadth of checks the tools performs and the cryptic nature of the messages has prompted me to rethink the way in which my documents are laid out, particularly considering that...
One of my earliest experiments in data visualization was to create visualization of the CSS propertieshttp://labs.rivendellweb.net/css-vis/css-tree3.html as they are documented in the Web Platform Documentationhttp://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/MainPage project. Now that it's in a shape where I'm willing to let it out in the wild it's time to write about it and explain the rationale and the technology. Rationale I'm a visual person. Rather than search for something that I may or may not know exactly what it is, I'd rather look at something that, I hope, will make it easier for me to find what I'm looking for. I'm also lazy. Instead...
In this essay I will take what may be an unpopular position: Using HTML with XML syntax XHTML is currently the best format to put your content in because it is easier to convert from XHTML/CSS to pretty much any other format. In making this case we'll explore and work in the following areas and answer the following questions: Definitions When we speak about XHTML in this document we refer to an HTML document using XHTML syntax. I will not change the mime type on the server to fully comply with XHTML restrictions. Why XHTML The two main reasons I...
