Hi Skier,<br><br>On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 2:38 AM, S Page <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:info@skierpage.com">info@skierpage.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
By "real", do you mean <a href="http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Book_reader_feature_set" target="_blank">http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Book_reader_feature_set</a> , or are there other requirements/wishes? I would be interested in reading them and figuring out what it </blockquote>
<div><br>Primarily, yes. I recently added "small footprint" to that set - it shouldn't take a lot of memory to read a text or html file, and a reader should support sensible interfaces to support compressed texts.<br>
</div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">takes to bring the features to Browse -- I'm confident they've been done as Firefox extensions. Nearly everything in that Book_reader_feature_set is in Browse except </blockquote>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> "Annotations, preferably sharable via network"; do any of the other book readers support annotations?</blockquote>
<div class="Ih2E3d"><br>You may be right. The memory required to run a barebones brower with extension support is a continuing problem, however.<br><br>For annotations and the like, a number of readers try to implement something sensible. There are some open standards, though people trying to implement new cool annotations features still regularly try to create new ones. Take a look at fab4 for an example of a project attempting some of what you describe:<br>
<a href="http://multivalent.sourceforge.net/Browser/">http://multivalent.sourceforge.net/Browser/</a><br><a href="http://bodoni.lib.liv.ac.uk/fab4/">http://bodoni.lib.liv.ac.uk/fab4/</a><br><br> <br>
</div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><a href="http://laptop.org" target="_blank">laptop.org</a> pages say compression is important, then they note JFFS2 does compression. So does compression matter or is it the filesystem's job?<br>
</blockquote><div><br>It matters. The compression with gzip for texts such as used in wikibrowse is much better than you get simply by storing the files on the filesystem.<br> <br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
(like wikibrowse).<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
WikiBrowse is indeed really cool. Is it a separate web server that responds to URL requests from Browse (or other programs) by handing back pages? It or another simple web server could do the aforementioned "You asked for bigpage.html, here's bigpage.html.gz".<br>
</blockquote><div><br>It is. Wade Brainerd helped port the server code used to python' it's worth a look.<br> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Is your use case<br>
* G1G1 users expecting their XO to be an eBook reader like the Kindle or Sony<br>
* or country deployments trying to make textbooks available for the XO<br>
? Seems the latter is best met by converting materials to HTML then providing them as collections.<br>
</blockquote><div><br>The immediate use case is the latter. I don't consider the two use cases to be very different howver. Both audiences have a need to immediately and smoothyl read pdfs they find or are given from a large pdf library - these may simply not yet have been converted to html (and the default conversion may be significantly ugly or difficult to parse) or they may not be ocr'ed, in which case they need to be converted to a set of images... and again we have no image-sequence-book-reader.<br>
<br>Both audiences have a need to read html materials displayed as dictated by the html, and to read txt and abw and doc materials created in their respective programs that come on the XO... which should render nicely and with the interface keybindings and options expected from a reader -- it makes no sense to provide different reader interfaces based on the format of the original, even though a highly-editable format may offer the additional option of opening the file in a novel and clever and separately-developed editor.<br>
<br>SJ<br><br> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><br>
Thanks for any elucidation you can provide,<br>
--<br><font color="#888888">
=S Page<br>
<br>
</font></blockquote></div><br>