HTML-first at Wiley, or, how we learned to stop worrying and love the DOM

When a customer reads an article on Wiley Online Library, it’s either a PDF (sad) or HTML (smile). When a customer reads an EPUB, she is reading HTML. The path to that HTML has not always been so straightforward. In the last several years, we have become increasingly aware of the value of quality HTML to our users. Wiley was an early adopter of XML-first or XML-early, but some of us began to question the value of the XML. We began experimenting with shifting from XML-first to HTML-first for a subset of Wiley’s online journals. Today we are in user testing for an HTML-first workflow for live journals, including a PDF output. We will talk about how we got here, the challenges we faced, and the fun we had along the way.