[whatwg] Spec formats

[Ian Hickson]

On Mon, 22 Mar 2010, Perry Smith wrote:
> On Mar 22, 2010, at 7:00 PM, Ian Hickson wrote:
> > 
> > If you would like to generate ePub or other formats of the spec, I 
> > would be happy to coordinate with you to set up a system that can do 
> > this on a regular basis for the spec, just like the PDF and multipage 
> > versions of the spec get regularly generated each day or with each 
> > update.
> 
> I would like to help with this.
> 
> I downloaded the source you pointed me to.  Are the post processing 
> tools available?
>
> The ePub generators all start with HTML.

What the best way to do this is depends on what exactly the generators do. 
Do you need the files with or without the section numbering and 
cross-references, for example? Do you want the JavaScript that does the 
reverse cross-referencing of <dfn> elements? How about the alternative 
style sheets for authors, and the UI to support them?

Also, which specs do you want to generate? The most useful spec to 
generate might be the complete.html file, since it's essentially a 
superset of all the others, but we might also want to just do the WHATWG 
HTML spec (i.e. HTML5), which would be shorter.


> There will also need to be some style sheet tweaking because usually the 
> readers are black and white.

There are a number of style sheets involved in the current scheme, but we 
can probably come up with some set of overrides to make the ePub copy 
suitably black and white.


> On a slightly different topic, is there an official "cover" for this 
> book (or these books)?

Not currently, but I'm sure we can figure something out. What should it 
look like?


The way the multipage version is generated currently is that I have a 
script that generates an HTML file, and when it's ready, I do an HTTP 
request to a service Philip maintains. That service then processes the 
HTML file appropriately and sends back a tarball with the multipage 
version all ready to be expanded. If we can set up something similar, that 
would be awesome.

If you'd like to coordinate this by IRC instead, which can be easier, 
the #whatwg channel on Freenode is the place to find me (Hixie).

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'