As reported elsewhere, the Digital Publishing Interest Group has published its first two public Working Drafts. Beyond the content of those documents, the publication has another aspect worth mentioning. For the first time, “alternate” versions of the two documents have been published, alongside the canonical HTML versions, in EPUB3 format. Because EPUB3 is based on the Open Web Platform, it is a much more faithful alternative to the original content than, for example, a PDF version (which has also been used, time to time, as alternate versions of W3C documents). The EPUB3 versions (of the “Requirements for Latin Text Layout and Pagination“ and the “Annotation Use Cases” Drafts, both linked from the respective documents’ front matter) can be used, for example, for off-line reading, relying on different EPUB readers, available either as standalone applications or as browser extensions.

(The EPUB3 versions were produced using a Python program, also available on github.)