08/04/2023
๐๐ก๐ฒ ๐ข๐ฌ ๐ญ๐ก๐๐ซ๐ ๐ ๐ง๐๐ฐ ๐ฏ๐๐ซ๐ฌ๐ข๐จ๐ง ๐จ๐ ๐๐๐๐ 3?
First, letโs take a quick detour into the why. EPUB as a format is over 20 years old, and EPUB 3 itself is over 11 years old. EPUB 3 was initially developed by an organization called the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), who had also developed EPUB2. A few years ago, IDPF agreed to merge with the World Wide Consortium (W3C), a standards body that developed standards for the web. It was a good fit, EPUB was a format built on web technologies like HTML and CSS, and this would give publishing direct access to those groups for better collaboration.
Shortly after the merger, the EPUB Community Group published EPUB 3.2, a revision of EPUB 3.0.1 that brought the specifications up to date and more in line with how the W3C does things. However, community groups canโt publish specifications (or in W3C parlance: recommendations), so in 2020 we formed the EPUB 3 Working Group to take the revised version of EPUB 3.2 and take it through the โRecommendation Processโ.
The Recommendation process is long and a bit convoluted, but to summarize weโve spent the last 2 years working on editing and improving the EPUB 3 specification to meet the requirements of a W3C recommendation, but also to address some long-standing issues with the specification itself. The one part of the process that is worth mentioning is what the W3C calls horizontal review, a step all recommendation-track documents must go through.
This involves asking several other groups in the W3C to review our specification, and each group has an area of focus.
The areas all recommendations are reviewed for are Accessibility, Privacy, Security, Internationalization, and overall architectural fit with the web. These reviews had a significant impact on the latest version of EPUB 3.
# epub3