Balisage Paper: The New W3C Publishing Activity

Abstract

The W3C is involving publishers and people and organizations who provide tools for publishers in an effort to change the Web so that it's suitable for publishing. The Open Web Platform is changing the ways people do things. Proprietary desktop tools are being replaced by Web-based applications. At the same time ebooks are forcing publishers to come to terms with producing multiple output formats from their assets, so that "XML Early" and "XML First" are hot buzzwords in the industry. The EPUB3 format, defined by IPDF, uses XHTML and CSS, W3C Web technologies. The Open Web Platform doesn't meet the needs of publishers today. So W3C is working more closely with IPDF, with publishers and designers, and others, to change the Web so that it's suitable for publishing. Technical work on CSS has already begun and W3C is looking at internationalization, HTML, metadata, and workflow.