> Therefore I decided to build a lighter EPUB reading system, Bene. You're using it right now. This document is an EPUB — you can download it by clicking the button in the top-right corner.
Because, reading this on a desktop browser, I didn't even notice until it was pointed out. It's more obvious on mobile because the header takes up more of the viewport, but it otherwise behaves pretty much like a normal web page.
This is probably a good thing.
For what it's worth, I didn't see (or at least didn't notice) a spinner when loading the doc for the first time like some other people in the comments reported. I did notice it on my phone, but it went by pretty quickly. I'm not sure if that's the WASM program loading and if it only happens the first time you load the page.
The main thing the spinner waits on is the .epub file to be downloaded. That file is 4.77 MB, which is appreciable for anyone without a fast connection. Most of that weight is images (99% after decompression). Unlike a normal webpage (or a PDF), rendering doesn't appear to start until all the assets, the whole ePub, has been downloaded.
This segues into a point of difference I thought the article would mention, but didn't: performance.
A PDF can be optimized so the pages are substantially independent of each other, which makes rendering pages progressive, random-access, and highly parallelizable.
This makes me wonder if EPUB pagination is possible? I know nothing about it, but if the format is standard enough, it might be possible to hack together an endpoint that returns the requested page(s).
> Therefore I decided to build a lighter EPUB reading system, Bene. You're using it right now. This document is an EPUB — you can download it by clicking the button in the top-right corner.
Because, reading this on a desktop browser, I didn't even notice until it was pointed out. It's more obvious on mobile because the header takes up more of the viewport, but it otherwise behaves pretty much like a normal web page.
This is probably a good thing.
For what it's worth, I didn't see (or at least didn't notice) a spinner when loading the doc for the first time like some other people in the comments reported. I did notice it on my phone, but it went by pretty quickly. I'm not sure if that's the WASM program loading and if it only happens the first time you load the page.