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Your ePub Is fine

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Re: Your ePub Is fine

#151

Post by thisislife2 »

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…

Those downvoting you have no idea of what you are talking about. Flash was what truly brought multimedia to the internet. You could make complex vector animations so easily in it, and it would only take a few minutes to load on a dialup or ISDN because of its small size (10's or 100's of KB). At one point, it used to power the whole of Youtube (and many other video sites). "Web applications" in this era actually meant something built with Flash. And it did all this on ancient hardware. Flash used to run on 90+ % of internet connected PCs at one point if I remember right. And because of that, you could count on Flash player more than the browsers they ran in. Adobe 100% screwed it up.

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#153

Post by thisislife2 »

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.

Or you can just use PaleMoon browser ( https://www.palemoon.org/ ) and install the original Flash player plug-in in it.

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#154

Post by ramblurr »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #17

Unfortunately, epub and epubcheck isn't the great uncontroversial resource the author makes it out to be. When W3C, Inc. took over maintenance of the EPub spec around when 3.1 was current, they just referenced WHATWG HTML and other ever-expanding browser specs ([1]). Being "living standards", these have no versioning or QA. As a consequence of being based on a version of HTML that redefined headers and sectioning, Ep…

Yes, it is widely known in the epub space that targeting 3.1 or 2 is the more sane option.

With EPUB compatibility issues CSS should always be suspect number 1. Using "modern" CSS features and complaining about missing flex boxz grid, etc is a web developer's mindset.

Just because EPUB shares some of the stack with the web doesn't mean they perfectly overlap (or even should).

Hardly any e-ink embedded e-reader devices use a browser for rendering, they all use purpose built HTML/CSS parsing and rendering toolchains, are baked into firmware and updated once in a blue moon. (If you're interested look at koreader's crengine or Crosspoint reader which runs on an ESP32!)

The blog post reeks of overly confident AI prose. But don't be fooled.

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#155

Post by zimpenfish »

sdenton4 wrote: post #126
kstrauser wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was never amazing. It was adequate to give creative people a way to work around its many shortcomings and make something cool anyway. The tech and the implementation was awful, and all credit goes to people who still managed to shine through it. For all the many reasons people might dislike Apple, they were 100% in the right on this topic. Flash needed to die. It got everyone to collectively push the web standard…

And yet, there was no html5 newgrounds. The magic of flash was that it gave a space where a music person, an art person, and a programmer could bang something out. The barrier to entry was comically low, which allowed an absolute explosion of content. Sometimes good products happen despite bad technical foundations.

> And yet, there was no html5 newgrounds.

Let me introduce you to itch.io[0] where, in fact, people bang out HTML5 games at a rate that will stagger your eyeballs.

(Even me, a resolute "backend-only" dinosaur managed to use a HTML5 game engine to knock something out playable in an hour or two.)

[0] https://itch.io/games/platform-web - ~689k results

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#156

Post by GreyStache »

tjoff wrote: post #149
m348e912 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Love or hate Steve Jobs, his insistence of not supporting Flash on the iPhone (in favor of HTML5) accelerated Flash's demise dramatically.

The best feature of flash was that it was so easy to disable. Because 99% of the use was annoying ads that pinned your cpu at 100%. And that was Jobs argument, that it was too resource intensive. Predictably though, now that annoying crap moved to "newer" tech (javascript) and now we can't disable it as easily or without as little consequence. Just as resource intensive though...

I never bought the benevolent technical angle for not supporting flash. I'm pretty sure Apple strategists knew the value of the gate-kept platform, the app-store revenue stream.

The pivotal point was that flash would break this stronghold by allowing rich applications that are reasonably self-publishable. (Excuse me while I go rinse that sentence out of my mouth)

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#157

Post by tekchip »

radley wrote: post #129
kstrauser wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was never amazing. It was adequate to give creative people a way to work around its many shortcomings and make something cool anyway. The tech and the implementation was awful, and all credit goes to people who still managed to shine through it. For all the many reasons people might dislike Apple, they were 100% in the right on this topic. Flash needed to die. It got everyone to collectively push the web standard…

> The tech and the implementation was awful, and all credit goes to people who still managed to shine through it. Sorry, that's simply not true. The tech was ahead of its time. The implementation was intuitive. Only developers and Steve Jobs hated it, because Flash made it way too easy for anyone to make something fun.

Also anyone who gave two shits about security hated it because it was a security nightmare. Don't leave a hater out.

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#158

Post by watwut »

fragmede wrote: post #87
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…

Compared to the best that someone can vibe code? Not to show my age, but we were kids when flash came out. That copy of macro media? I don't know about you. We spent hours and hours and hours with that spend hours and hours and hours with vibecoding and tell me that you really can't accomplish similar shit. Then you just to deploy it you and I might be to smart to just paste your Vercel API key in ChatGPT, but preten…

Yes compared to vibe coded stuff too. And it costed less money.

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#159

Post by stefanfisk »

GreyStache wrote: post #156
tjoff wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best feature of flash was that it was so easy to disable. Because 99% of the use was annoying ads that pinned your cpu at 100%. And that was Jobs argument, that it was too resource intensive. Predictably though, now that annoying crap moved to "newer" tech (javascript) and now we can't disable it as easily or without as little consequence. Just as resource intensive though...

I never bought the benevolent technical angle for not supporting flash. I'm pretty sure Apple strategists knew the value of the gate-kept platform, the app-store revenue stream. The pivotal point was that flash would break this stronghold by allowing rich applications that are reasonably self-publishable. (Excuse me while I go rinse that sentence out of my mouth)

It took them years to realize that the App Store could be a thing.

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#160

Post by anilakar »

chocolatkey wrote: post #42

Kobo is actually in the process of completely rewriting their e-reader software (you can download the beta in the EU), and I’m pretty sure it’s no longer based on RMSDK. Adobe basically handed the EPUB DRM market to LCP on a silver platter by being a poor maintainer and then selling off to a third party that had botched the migration and further angered end users and platforms, that are switching off Adobe faster tha…

Only in EU because of the Accessibility Act[1]. Copywrong holders are allowed to disable screen readers elsewhere because that allows them to sell more audiobooks. You will apparently also lose many other features, among them Asian scripts and developer mode.

[1] https://www.kobo.com/kobo-writing-life/blog/our-commitment-t...

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