Not everybody knows that HTML 5 has been released in two flavours: HTML 5 proper, which uses the old serialization, similarly to HTML 4, and what is often incorrectly called XHTML 5 which uses XML serialization, like XHTML and XHTML 1.1 did. The two serializations have different grades of strictness, and the browsers deal witht hem that way.
It so happens that the default output on DocBook for XHTML 1 is compatible with the HTML serialization, which means that even if the files have a .html extension, locally, they will load correctly in Chrome, for instance. The same can’t be said to XHTML 1.1 or XHTML5 output; one particularly nasty problem is that the generated code will output XML-style tags such as <a id="foo" /> which throw off the browsers entirely, unless properly loaded as XHTML … and on the other hand, IE still has trouble when served properly-typed XHTML (i.e. you have to serve it as application/xml rather than application/xhtml+xml).
So I have two choices: redirect all the .html requests to .xhtml, make it use XHTML 5 and work around the IE8 (and earlier) limitations, or I can forget about XHTML 5 at all. This starts to get tricky! So for the moment I decided to not go with XHTML 5, and at the same time I’m going to keep building ePub 2 books, and publish them as they are, instead of using ePub 3 (even though, as I said, O’Reilly got it working for their workflow).
Unfortunately even if I went through that on the server side to fix it, that wouldn’t even be enough alone! I would have to also change the CSS, since many things that were always <div> before, are now using proper semantic types, including <section> (with the exception of the table of contents on the first landing page, obviously (damn). This actually makes it easier in one way as it lets me drop the stupid nth-child CSS3 trick I used to set the style of the main div, compared to the header and footer. Hopefully this should let me fix the nasty IE 3 style beveled border that Chrome put around the Flattr button when using XHTML 5.
In the mean time I have a few general fixes to the style, now I just need to wait for the cover image to come from my designer friend, and then I can update both the website and the eBook versions all around the stores.
To close the post.. David you deserve a public apology: while you were listed as <editor> on the DocBook sources before, and the XSL was supposed to emit it on the homepage, for whatever reason, it fails to. I’ve upgrade you to <author> until I can find why the XSL is misbehaving so I can fix it properly.
In the mean time, tomorrow I’ll write a few more words about automake and then
