![]() ![]() Plus, that standard changes frequently as more terms and features are added. This is very useful to the publisher who needs to convey that metadata to a recipient who knows how to handle it, but it is too much to ask all EPUB 3 reading systems to be able to handle. ![]() ONIX is a good example of that: it provides for literally hundreds of different features and codes by which book supply chain metadata can be described no publisher uses all of it, and different publishers make different choices as to what to use. While EPUB 3 enables full-blown metadata records like ONIX files for distribution and MARC records for cataloguing to be provided, such records are rich, complex, and can be used quite differently by different publishers. It’s important to realize that this is not just designed to make it easy to create EPUBs equally important is that it is designed to make it easy for reading systems to process EPUBs. ![]() Voilá, the “website in a box”-but one with a complete packing list and indispensable assembly instructions that ensure that an EPUB 3–compliant reading system will deliver the publication properly to the end user.īefore we take the lid off the box, let’s look at the basic building blocks of EPUB 3 metadata.Ī basic default vocabulary that all EPUB 3 reading systems are required to understand Ī short list of reserved vocabularies that can be used with their standard prefixes without declaration andĪ mechanism by which any other vocabulary and its prefix can be declared, along with a pointer to where the authoritative definition of that vocabulary (in either human-readable or machine-readable form) can be found. All of this is then literally “zipped up” in a single-file container, the. opf stands for Open Package Format, which was the precursor to the new Publications specification.) In addition to containing most of the EPUB’s metadata, the package document serves as a hub that associates that metadata with the other resources comprising the EPUB. The place where all this information is organized is the package document, an XML file that is one of the fundamental components of an EPUB, the. While it doesn’t require much more than EPUB 2 did (in the interest of backward compatibility), it accommodates the much richer metadata that makes publications so much more discoverable and dynamic, so much more usable and useful. EPUB 3 accommodates much richer metadata than EPUB 2 did, and it enables that metadata to be associated not just with the publication as a whole, but also with individual components of the publication and even with elements within the content documents themselves. This, of course, is what metadata is for: it’s not the content, it’s information about the content. And it enables publishers to provide that information in one clear, consistent form that all reading systems should understand, rather than in different, proprietary ways for each recipient system. ![]() It’s designed to enable reading systems to easily and reliably know, up front, what’s contained in a given publication, where to find each thing, what to do with it, how the parts relate to each other. What is arguably the most important thing about it is this: it organizes all the stuff in the box. In fact, EPUB is sometimes thought of as “a website in a box,” though it is actually much more than that. It is a publication format, and as such it specifies and documents a host of things that publications need to include-content documents, style sheets, images, media, scripts, fonts, and more, as discussed in detail in the other chapters of this book. epub, people sometimes fail to realize that EPUB is not just, and not mainly, a specification for the markup of content documents. (“Should I use EPUB or DocBook?” or, even worse, “Should I use EPUB or HTML5?” Hint: EPUB (pretty much) = HTML5.) Due partly to the convenient single-file format provided as. One of the most common misconceptions about EPUB is that it is a “flavor” of XML. ![]()
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