W3 standards offer no clear competitive advantage for iBooks
Daniel Glazman responds to John Gruber comments on proprietary HTML extensions. I just do not see any clear competitive advantage for Apple to provide a W3 standard compliant format for iBooks when the goal is to target just the iPad. The primary goal is to sell iPads and create a market around them not to sell primarily iBooks or ePubs or whatever.
Glazman: “Opening up everything and using only carefully chosen standards and matching the version of WebKit used by Safari would have given an immense and almost unbeatable competitive advantage to Apple, …” is just a standards religious statement of belief unfettered by actual business logic. In the real publishing world with some orientation to paper non-W3 standards such as DOC/DOCX and PDF are prevalent. Which means that people and businesses buy MS Word and Adobe Acrobat
This is supported by Daniel Glazman! : “MS Word remains the main format requested by Publishers all around the world, and it’s not going to change any time soon, …”
ASIDE: Glazman – …These days are over, and Microsoft finally embraced Web Standards and all rejoiced. Microsoft Sharepoint has lots of W3 standards technology and its really nasty to format and develop templates for. In contrast iBooks Author looks really nice to work with.
