[zwayhowder]

I had the same thought, but wanted to know why the Author thought they were not.

For example, a major issue for self-containment is that EPUB content can embed external assets. A content document can legally include an image or font file whose src is a URL to a hosted server. This is not hypothetical, either; as of the time of writing, Google Doc's EPUB exporter will emit CSS that will @include external Google Fonts files. The problem is that such an EPUB will not render correctly without an internet connection, nor will it render correctly if Google changes the URLs of its font files.

The article raises some interesting ideas. Much like PDF and PDF/A, I would say an EPUB/A standard would be potentially useful.

[adamzochowski]

But same font problem exists with PDFs. If font is not embedded into PDF, or rendered into a vector shape that embedded, then PDF will display garbage.

[BHSPitMonkey]

Isn't that solved in PDF/A, which the GP was implying could also be done for EPUB?

[jasomill]

Yes: among other things, PDF/A requires all fonts to be embedded.

[BarbaryCoast]

Thanks for that. I can't read the article, probably because I block WASM (and Javascript) for security. None of my ebook readers have Internet access (for security and for privacy), so none of those internet-only epub files would work for me.

This might be "legal", since XHTML was intended for the web, but I assume Google's using it to collect more user interaction data that they can sell to data brokers.

FWIW, PDF is simply Postscript that's been compressed. As far as I can tell, almost all documents these days are created with Microsoft Word, TeX, or Postscript. I'm lumping things like PageMaker and LaTeX in with the base they were derived from.

[Symbiote]

The article is a WASM EPUB viewer. There's a link shown in the viewer to the EPUB file:

https://willcrichton.net/notes/portable-epubs/epubs/portable...