At the recent TOC conference in New York, I had the opportunity to sit down with Jeff Jaffe, CEO of the World Wide Web Consortium, to talk about the Open Web Platform and standardization issues. In our video interview (embedded below), Jaffe says HTML5 is by no means a replacement for ebook formats like EPUB or Mobi — he says HTML5 is the core markup used on the web and that EPUB can be viewed as a specialization (at the 0:44 mark) and that increased communication between the communities “will allow us to have better standards built into HTML, so that way, publishing specific standards like EPUB would be able to have far greater capabilities.” (At the 1:39 mark.)
Toward that end, Jaffe says the appreciation and acceptance of standards has increased in the past few years as a matter of necessity:
“I think standardization is recognized as essential for web technology. HTML5, the next generation markup, is bringing high-capability, rich multi-media to the web. It’s also a point in time in which this multi-media web is running across a wide range of devices; it’s no longer just the desktop and the laptop — it’s not even just the mobile phone anymore. You have ebooks, you have tablets; they’re starting to put web technology into cars. You can’t possibly have a rich web operating on such a wide diversity of devices unless you have standards. It’s that simultaneous, rich multi-media and the web of devices that’s driving everyone to a world of standards. (At the 2:36 mark.)
You can view Jaffe’s full interview in the following video:
All keynotes and video interviews from TOC NY 2013 can be found on the TOC 2013 YouTube playlist.