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> 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.
by 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 agoSecurity 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 agoThey 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.