Something great begins today…

When I started reading about XML back in 1998 I couldn’t have imagined this would ever come to pass, but it has: I’m now a member of the W3C working groups on XML Security and CSS.

A couple of days ago (on my birthday, no less!) I had the honour of moderating a session at the inaugural W3C and IDPF workshop on eBooks and the Open Web Platform, “eBooks: Great Expectations for Web Standards.” Due to a little something I wrote a while ago, I was asked to provide a position paper to the conference which naturally I was quite happy to do. One thing led to another, and there I was on Tuesday in New York, talking about DRM technology in a workshop hosted by O’Reilly, one of the most ardently anti-DRM companies you might name.

I’ve been asked a number of times to provide some examples on how to make use of AQXMLParser. A question which came in today has prompted me to make the effort and actually put together a simple project which demonstrates its use, along with its companion classes HTTPMessage and AQGzipInputStream.

Turns out, developing iOS apps is different from developing web apps. Like, hella different. For any server-side readers out there, I thought I’d hit you with a few big ones: There is no CSS. Every part of a design has to be coded in Objective-C.

• There is no flow layout (like HTML). Everything is position: absolute;.
• Small “cosmetic changes” can mean hours or days for developers to complete.
• No one unit tests in Cocoa. Like, no one.</li>
• Likewise, unit testing is a bitch.
• No one does automated UI testing. There are some open source projects, but it’s far from the mainstream.

[I]f Amazon was a “threat” that needed to be squelched by means of an illegal conspiracy, why would Apple offer Amazon’s Kindle app on the iPad? Why would Apple conclude that conspiring to force Amazon to no longer lose money on eBooks would cripple Amazon’s competitive fortunes? And why would Apple perceive the need for an illegal solution to the “Kindle threat” when it had an obvious and lawful one which it implemented – namely, introducing a multipurpose device (the iPad) whose marketing and sales success was not centered on eBook sales?

A nice little tutorial here on the use of AQGridView on iOS 5.0.

The IDPF has got together a who’s-who of people and companies in the eBook world to work on an open-source implementation of a reference ePub3 reading system and container library. And of course Kobo is putting a ton of weight behind it. Also, me: I’m going to be working on this project full-time here very shortly.

The astute Mr. Gemmell earlier today made note of a rather elitist-sounding article over at paidContent:UK. The author of that piece rather laments the fact that eBook consumption is led by ‘genre fiction’. You know– everything that most people read; something — shudder — classifiable. Science fiction. Romance. Crime. Horror. Fantasy. Historical.