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Comment by darkhorse13 | Hacker News Reader

I know what you mean, I really do. But think of an interactive document that keeps updating itself with remote data. That sounds really cool to me.

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That’s a website.

It is. But you can't really run an HTML file locally without at least setting up some type of server (if you plan to make requests). And I know setting up a server is extremely easy, but it's almost impossible for someone who hasn't programmed before.

The point you’re missing is that if you just change the file extension of a ePub to html it will work fine in the browser. There’s nothing special going on. Just bec most .html files are served from a remote location that doesn’t mean they need to be, you can send someone a .html file as a download which they can open from their desktop, it will work just as well as an ePub file, in fact bec the browser recognizes the file ext it will likely run it better!

> you just change the file extension of a ePub to html it will work fine in the browser

Isn't epub a zip file of a bunch of html docs, metadata and images?

> if you just change the file extension of a ePub to html it will work fine in the browser

If that's the case, you didn't have a genuine EPUB to start with. To meet the spec it needs to be in a container (a renamed ZIP file) and have a handful of related metadata and navigation files alongside it.

That said, the actual text of the book is done by HTML/CSS, but within the EPUB container file.

I don't understand, by definition, where is that remote data going to come from, if not another computer ? Also, peer to peer software has made it easier.

Most frequently used in my experience by malware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MHTML

Maybe what you are searching for is just a html page exported.

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