DPUB IG Telco, 2015-04-13: Aria Module, Packaging, Identifiers

See the minutes online for a more detailed record of the discussions.

Discussion on the ARIA module

The DPUB ARIA module should get a publication approval (to publish the document as a first public draft) from both the DPUB IG and Protocols and Format (PF) Working Group. However, it seems that, during their last teleconference, the PF Working Group has raised some issues that may have to be solved before this first publications. The issues they have are:

• some participants would prefer to have prefixes for the terms for modules, such as the publishing one; essentially they end up in different domains
• there were also some concerns about specific terms that may clash with similar terms elsewhere in ARIA

The IG discussed these issues; it seems that the Digital Publishing community at large would be very much against the usage of extra prefixes to the role attribute terms; some publishers may decide to completely ignore the terms altogether if that was the case.

The issue was discussed and was agreed that an email discussion should follow to flesh out the issues before a telco planned with the PF Working Group in about two weeks

Packaging examples

A new Wiki page has been created to list the functionality of the current packaging used in EPUB: what additional information, files, etc, are defined and used. On longer terms, the use cases on packaging should be used to identify possible differences between the current packaging format and the Web Packaging format as worked on elsewhere at W3C. This is an ongoing work.

Identifiers

There were some discussion on the mailing list and this led to a refresh of the corresponding wiki page of the task force. An interesting approach is provided by the so called "selectors" or the Open Annotation Model (which is currently a Working Draft): this provides a general structure to describe ranges, exact positions, etc, in a very flexible manner.

The problem with that approach, however, is that the selectors are not expressed in form of a URI. Indeed, the example in the document:

 "selector": {
    "@id": "http://example.org/selector1",
    "@type": "oa:DataPositionSelector",
     "start": 4096,
     "end": 4104
}

is a structure describing an anchor point in a document, but it is not a fragment identifier that can be part of a URI. Although it may be possible to translate that into a fragment, i.e., something like:

#selector(type=DataPositionSelector,start=4096,end=4104)

The ideal would be if there were some sort of a standard to make this mapping if possible. It was agreed that the question should be asked to the editors of the annotation document to find out whether there is, or has been, work on this, or whether there are fundamental issues that makes this type of mapping impossible or undesirable.