Scholarly HTML is an early initiative to formalize which HTML elements should be used for scholarly articles. It has a community group, but activity has stalled in recent years.
RASH is another attempt to formalize which HTML elements – and in which combinations - are recommended for writing academic articles. CSS can be applied for traditional 1960 ALGOL-60-look of your paper, even if it is on the web.
Dokieli is a web-based editor for academic articles, with support for decentralized annotations (using W3C Web Annotation Model) and notifications (Using W3) Linked Data Notifications). This example also shows how to by-pass the traditional publishing limitations – include a hyperlink to the live HTML paper in the abstract. (you could even by-pass paywalls like that..although this paper is Gold Open Access at Springer).
With a click on the tool icon you can “fork” the article and edit it further, saved at your own location, or add annotations and reviews.
Linked Research is an initiative to by-pass traditional publishers all together. This is taking the preprint idea further – just publish your paper anywhere on the web, and notify the Linked Research Inbox to solicit distributed reviews of your article. It encourages using HTML to the fullest – no restrictions on elements, you can embed live data, animations and web applications. While using dokie.li helps with the authoring side, hosting is up to each author. This raises many questions to future preservation, availability, neutrality, dependencies (embedded content), citations, identity and versioning – overlapping with the concerns we identified for Research Objects.
A very lively discussion about these different approaches emerged last month on the scholarly-html mailing list – bring out the popcorn and follow the different opinions!
Let’s not forget the oldies – ePub is a standardized eBook format, basically a zip file with manifest and a bunch of HTML pages (e.g. one per chapter). Their archive actually is the basis for our Research Object Bundle.
ePub lives on in the recently started Digital Publishing Working Group at W3C