[LINK] iPad experimentation begins: e-media

[Tom Worthington]

Marghanita da Cruz wrote:
> Tom Worthington wrote:
> <snip>
>> ... multimedia e-book format, using HTML 5 ...
> 
> ... print function of the browser. This could possibly encourage more 
> people to use HTML in preference to Word/PDF. ...

Yes, an add-on for a web browser to turn a set of web pages into an 
ebook should be much simpler than PDF production. The application just 
has to make any adjustments to the markup to conform to the web version 
the ebook uses, create some XML metadata and Zip it all up. This is not 
that much different to some of the addons available for web browsers 
already.

Of course if the original web pages are not well designed the resulting
ebook is not going to work well. As an example, documents might not
adjust to different size screens well. Excessive use of Javascript and
"Web 2.0" would be a problem, as ebooks are relatively static.

> Though the real problem is that the media formats are not going to be 
> compatible with all browsers/readers ...

Assuming that accessibility design principles are followed with the 
original web pages, that should be less of an issue. If a particular 
audio or video can't be played, the reader should be able to get a text 
description which at least tells them what they are missing. They can 
the decide if they want to go to the trouble of getting a plug-in to 
play it.

YouTube have announced automatic transcriptions of audio in English,
which might help, if it works. I submitted videos but got "Machine 
Transcription (Failed)".


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Lecturer, The Australian National University t: 02 61255694
Computer Science http://cs.anu.edu.au/user/3890

 From - Wed