Panel with Dave Cramer (Hachette Book Group), Stefan Hermann (infinity-loop GmbH), Bill Kasdorf (Apex Content Solutions), Denis Saulnier (Harvard Business Publishing).
Think XHTML is just for your website? Think again. HTML 5 is now the lingua franca for EPUB 3, modern browsers, and apps—as well as standards ranging from PSV for magazines to DAISY for accessibility—and XML gives it the rigor and power needed for your whole workflow, not just the end of it.
XHTML got new respect and I got to agree with that. HTML was a mess, adding decorative functions to it, which really messed up things even more. XHTML was too strict. Other stuff appeared in the history like DocBook, NLM and TEI. Gee, I did not think I was so old… Those things resonates to me.
Anyhow, at some point, you need HTML.
HTML 5 is the way to go. One good trick is to use HTML 5 specifics as attributes of elements in XHTML. XHTML can become a pivot format, like we consider the WebDocument WebObjekt we use in GreenIvory internal structures.
Hachette’s Dave Cramer reports that the company is going to only use only HTML in its publication process. However, authors still use Microsoft Word and similar word processors. However, they know use a more advanced tool, web based tool called Digital Publisher using different modules including P:Writer.
Hachette books are then based on the same HTML and are adapted to the different editions they ship based on marketing needs, like a special Costco edition… Hey! I love Costco :)…
Harvard Business Publishing (HBP) uses PDFs but is switching to EPUB and HTML. Going to this technology will enable HBP to create more interactive document and be ready for future formats too. Denis Saulnier describes a pretty complex process where they use a tool called UpCast. However, authors are still using Microsoft Word too.
Stefan Hermann from Infinite Loop GmbH is an expert at transforming tools, mainly transforming Microsoft Word into XHTML. The process is more complex that what it appears. However, I am sure that stricter use of Word can help too. I remember a project where we actually used Word as a development environment for lambda-users to create test script.
The conclusion is really that Microsoft Word is probably here to stay…
