It's a very well thought through article by the developer of Nota, trying to bring EPUB format up to parity with PDF. It's a serious start and they've already written a viewer. In fact, the article itself is displayed in a browser-based wasm port of the viewer (and looks good!).
One issue is how precisely EPUB, which is really XHTML, can reproduce layout. What are the possibilities here? The OP's standard is that the document will look "reasonable". The imply that HTML would need new layout capabilities to match PDF, at least for line breaking:
There's two ways to make progress here. One is for browsers to provide more typography tools. Allegedly, text-wrap: pretty is supposed to help, but in my brief testing it doesn't seem to improve line-break quality. The other way is to pre-calculate line breaks, which would only work for fixed-layout renditions.
Also, though the author mentions annotations, I don't see how they intend to implement them.
One issue is how precisely EPUB, which is really XHTML, can reproduce layout. What are the possibilities here? The OP's standard is that the document will look "reasonable". The imply that HTML would need new layout capabilities to match PDF, at least for line breaking:
There's two ways to make progress here. One is for browsers to provide more typography tools. Allegedly, text-wrap: pretty is supposed to help, but in my brief testing it doesn't seem to improve line-break quality. The other way is to pre-calculate line breaks, which would only work for fixed-layout renditions.
Also, though the author mentions annotations, I don't see how they intend to implement them.