Preface

The goal is to describe a book with several HTML5 files and use a simple command line tool (makeWebBook) to add missing pieces to these files (like section numbers and navigation bars) and to generate a "table of contents" file that links to all sections and subsections. The result is a web book that has all the advantages of web-technology, and still follows the traditional approach of scientific and technical books to structure the content. For example, it is then possible to state: "see the details in section 3.4" and this will be a link to the appropriate information. In standard HTML pages it is awkward to define such cross references and therefore many technical descriptions on the web are not as convenient as they could be.

The generated web book can be either used directly in a web page, or it can be zipped, downloaded on a computer, unzipped and then inspected locally in a browser.

There are many other approaches how books, and especially scientific and technical books, can be built for the web. In Chapter 4 several alternatives are shortly sketched, with their pros and cons. Note, the obvious choice, epub3, has the severe disadvantage that neither commercial nor open source tools are yet good enough for editing or rendering the needed web standards (HTML5, svg, webgl, javascript), as compared with the much better and more powerful rendering engine of Firefox.

October 2015, Martin Otter