5 ms·

This makes no sense to me. EPUB is basically HTML in a ZIP container with mandatory included files. If you already have a full-blown web browser, and a ZIP li

This makes no sense to me. EPUB is basically HTML in a ZIP container with mandatory included files. If you already have a full-blown web browser, and a ZIP library at hand, naively rendering EPUB pages by unzipping to temp files and tweaking the URI resolver is an easy addition. If you already have a full-blown web browser that already renders EPUB pages better than a lot of EPUB-specific reader programs, removing that support is doing work to reduce functionality.

sedatk 7y ago
If it isn't used a lot, I'd prefer the budget to go somewhere more useful instead.
- snazz 7y ago
  They don’t have to maintain it, they just don’t need to completely get rid of it. That part is baffling.
  - WalterGR 7y ago
    Didn’t Microsoft kind of do that with IE 6? a. How well did that work out? and b. How does the ‘tech community’ view Microsoft for that choice?
    - snazz 7y ago
      An ePub reader is a little different than an entire browser. They’re already getting rid of Edge Classic at some point anyway; why remove a useful feature before then?
  - themacguffinman 7y ago
    > They don’t have to maintain it Yes they do. Rarely used, unmaintained code is a great way to accrue security vulnerabilities and other bugs.
    - icebraining 7y ago
      Security vulnerabilities can only occur when the software bridges two different levels of privilege ("crossing the airtight hatchway", as Raymond Chen puts it). An EPUB reader has no business doing that, it can run completely inside the same restricted environment as any other potentially-malicious website. Other bugs, sure, but since when did presence of bugs prevent anyone - much less Microsoft - from shipping anything? Especially since the whole browser is going away anyway, so there's no long term burden.
    - logfromblammo 7y ago
      They would still have to maintain it, but they wouldn't need to add features. If they coded it well enough in the first place, that could be one person putting in 8 hours a month on the highest-priority issues in the backlog. EPUB is a container format. It's basically an encapsulated multi-page website with some metadata. The marginal effort for a web browser is unpacking the files with a ZIP library and deciding how going from chapter001.html to chapter002.html works inside the existing UI. If you don't want to think much about the latter, render each page exactly as if it were downloaded from an online website, and use the forward and back buttons to step along the built in reading order. I actually wonder why all web browsers don't support it natively.

sedatk 7y ago

If it isn't used a lot, I'd prefer the budget to go somewhere more useful instead.

snazz 7y ago
They don’t have to maintain it, they just don’t need to completely get rid of it. That part is baffling.
- WalterGR 7y ago
  Didn’t Microsoft kind of do that with IE 6? a. How well did that work out? and b. How does the ‘tech community’ view Microsoft for that choice?
  - snazz 7y ago
    An ePub reader is a little different than an entire browser. They’re already getting rid of Edge Classic at some point anyway; why remove a useful feature before then?
- themacguffinman 7y ago
  > They don’t have to maintain it Yes they do. Rarely used, unmaintained code is a great way to accrue security vulnerabilities and other bugs.
  - icebraining 7y ago
    Security vulnerabilities can only occur when the software bridges two different levels of privilege ("crossing the airtight hatchway", as Raymond Chen puts it). An EPUB reader has no business doing that, it can run completely inside the same restricted environment as any other potentially-malicious website. Other bugs, sure, but since when did presence of bugs prevent anyone - much less Microsoft - from shipping anything? Especially since the whole browser is going away anyway, so there's no long term burden.
  - logfromblammo 7y ago
    They would still have to maintain it, but they wouldn't need to add features. If they coded it well enough in the first place, that could be one person putting in 8 hours a month on the highest-priority issues in the backlog. EPUB is a container format. It's basically an encapsulated multi-page website with some metadata. The marginal effort for a web browser is unpacking the files with a ZIP library and deciding how going from chapter001.html to chapter002.html works inside the existing UI. If you don't want to think much about the latter, render each page exactly as if it were downloaded from an online website, and use the forward and back buttons to step along the built in reading order. I actually wonder why all web browsers don't support it natively.