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Your ePub Is fine

andreklein.net

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Re: Your ePub Is fine

#31

Post by nfw2 »

As someone who has spent a good deal of time trying to build ereader software, eventually I decided to try to deal with the devil and build on top of RMSDK.

There is no way to get access to it. I don't mean the licensing cost is prohibitively expensive for an indie dev although I understand that to be the case as well.

There is no one to talk to. The email listed on their website does not respond to anything. Not even so much as a "Thanks for your interest" or a "We will get back to you".

I messaged a former colleague who worked there to try to see what the process is to get access to rmsdk. He said he tried to find internal docs about it and couldn't find anything.

I tried to find people on linkedin who might be associated with rmsdk and ask them and similarly found nothing.

Meanwhile publishers only distribute most of their titles with one of their known drm vendors ie Apple, Amazon, or Adobe. The other two are entirely closed off.

If this isn't anticompetitive trust behavior, I don't know what is.

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#32

Post by LeFantome »

echelon wrote: post #24
acdha wrote: post #20

Adobe has always been like this, too. They squandered an enormous marketshare with Flash because the alternative would've been spending a couple million on QA and they managed to unite all of the browser manufacturers in agreement that the web was better off without such an unreliable partner. I shipped a couple of things on Flash back in the day but it was staggeringly bad software — random crashes, various heisenbu…

Flash is still unsurpassed as the easiest publishing medium. JavaScript build system layer cake and "web standards" are a million times harder than just drawing some stuff, maybe writing a simple function, then building a static file that can be embedded anywhere and even downloaded. You have to spend so much time setting up any flash alternative, and the "standards" are worse. I hate Steve Jobs for killing Flash and…

You know you can use Ruffle if you really want Flash right?

https://ruffle.rs

But the only standard you need is WASM. All browsers support it. Use whatever you want to make it. In fact, Ruffle is just a WASM app.

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#34

Post by ameliaquining »

LeFantome wrote: post #32
echelon wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flash is still unsurpassed as the easiest publishing medium. JavaScript build system layer cake and "web standards" are a million times harder than just drawing some stuff, maybe writing a simple function, then building a static file that can be embedded anywhere and even downloaded. You have to spend so much time setting up any flash alternative, and the "standards" are worse. I hate Steve Jobs for killing Flash and…

You know you can use Ruffle if you really want Flash right? https://ruffle.rs But the only standard you need is WASM. All browsers support it. Use whatever you want to make it. In fact, Ruffle is just a WASM app.

The problem is that, while there's no theoretical barrier to an authoring tool with a Director-like user experience that exports to Wasm, no one has actually written one, and it's not a small amount of work.

(I agree that we're better off without Flash, but this particular problem is real and unsolved.)

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#35

Post by m104 »

echelon wrote: post #24
acdha wrote: post #20

Adobe has always been like this, too. They squandered an enormous marketshare with Flash because the alternative would've been spending a couple million on QA and they managed to unite all of the browser manufacturers in agreement that the web was better off without such an unreliable partner. I shipped a couple of things on Flash back in the day but it was staggeringly bad software — random crashes, various heisenbu…

Flash is still unsurpassed as the easiest publishing medium. JavaScript build system layer cake and "web standards" are a million times harder than just drawing some stuff, maybe writing a simple function, then building a static file that can be embedded anywhere and even downloaded. You have to spend so much time setting up any flash alternative, and the "standards" are worse. I hate Steve Jobs for killing Flash and…

Yeah but the execution still mattered. I'm a Flash / Shockwave fan as well but there's no point pretending that package was sufficient for the job it was pitched to do. Macromedia seemed to be on a really good track with Shockwave and Flash, but either didn't set up the technology for internet success, or really just sold out the goods with the Adobe acquisition.

In any case, take heart though. If we did it once, we can do it again.

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#36

Post by danpalmer »

> Epubcheck does basic CSS checking of course, but it can’t validate CSS against a renderer which is fundamentally broken!

But isn't that kind of the point of epubcheck? It's surely not intended to validate all of CSS, it's intended to validate that an epub will work... and not working on Kobo devices (probably #2 manufacturer of ebook readers?) is a major issue.

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#37

Post by drtz »

echelon wrote: post #24
acdha wrote: post #20

Adobe has always been like this, too. They squandered an enormous marketshare with Flash because the alternative would've been spending a couple million on QA and they managed to unite all of the browser manufacturers in agreement that the web was better off without such an unreliable partner. I shipped a couple of things on Flash back in the day but it was staggeringly bad software — random crashes, various heisenbu…

Flash is still unsurpassed as the easiest publishing medium. JavaScript build system layer cake and "web standards" are a million times harder than just drawing some stuff, maybe writing a simple function, then building a static file that can be embedded anywhere and even downloaded. You have to spend so much time setting up any flash alternative, and the "standards" are worse. I hate Steve Jobs for killing Flash and…

> Websites are still inferior to Flash of the early 2000s. It's taken decades and they can only mimic a fraction of its power.

Is this a troll? What could an application do with Flash in 2005 that we can't do with a modern web application today (excluding the obvious answer of runtime vulnerabilities that allowed apps to escape the sandbox)?

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#38

Post by gsnedders »

danpalmer wrote: post #36

> Epubcheck does basic CSS checking of course, but it can’t validate CSS against a renderer which is fundamentally broken! But isn't that kind of the point of epubcheck? It's surely not intended to validate all of CSS, it's intended to validate that an epub will work... and not working on Kobo devices (probably #2 manufacturer of ebook readers?) is a major issue.

epubcheck is meant to ensure conformance with the standards, not the interoperably implemented subset of the standards. (Which has lots of awkward questions: which implementations of the standards, which versions of those implementations, etc.)

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#39

Post by ameliaquining »

gsnedders wrote: post #38
danpalmer wrote: post #36

> Epubcheck does basic CSS checking of course, but it can’t validate CSS against a renderer which is fundamentally broken! But isn't that kind of the point of epubcheck? It's surely not intended to validate all of CSS, it's intended to validate that an epub will work... and not working on Kobo devices (probably #2 manufacturer of ebook readers?) is a major issue.

epubcheck is meant to ensure conformance with the standards, not the interoperably implemented subset of the standards. (Which has lots of awkward questions: which implementations of the standards, which versions of those implementations, etc.)

The latter seems like what the tool's users actually want. That it's a harder problem doesn't change that.

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#40

Post by ricardonunez »

drtz wrote: post #37
echelon wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flash is still unsurpassed as the easiest publishing medium. JavaScript build system layer cake and "web standards" are a million times harder than just drawing some stuff, maybe writing a simple function, then building a static file that can be embedded anywhere and even downloaded. You have to spend so much time setting up any flash alternative, and the "standards" are worse. I hate Steve Jobs for killing Flash and…

> Websites are still inferior to Flash of the early 2000s. It's taken decades and they can only mimic a fraction of its power. Is this a troll? What could an application do with Flash in 2005 that we can't do with a modern web application today (excluding the obvious answer of runtime vulnerabilities that allowed apps to escape the sandbox)?

what’s he is referring is the editor and the easy way of drawing things, still agree we can do things today but a easy to draw editor like that is missing. I was a fan of flash and fireworks.
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