DPUB IG Telco, 2015-07-13: dpub-aria, fragment identifiers

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

Digital Publishing WAI-ARIA Module

The first public working draft of the Digital Publishing WAI-ARIA Module is out, and the IG is now focusing on receiving input from the community about its viability and future. A separate blog post identifies a set of questions that needs discussion.

Meanwhile, the IG taskforce will continue working on the next public draft of the module. In particular, we will focus on

• investigating additional terms to be added to the document
• discussion of moving of certain terms into ARIA 1.1 core
• coming to terms with the handling of link types (the role and rel attributes)
• starting work on the separate AT API mappings companion document

Fragment Identifiers Status Update

Through the notion of using Service Workers as the vehicle for handling offline/caching in EPUB+WEB, we reach a point where the discussion of specialized fragment identifiers for digital publications becomes moot. The identifiers taskforce will instead be able to focus on working with the relevant media type authorities to make sure that fragment identification needs of digital publishing are met in the generic fragment identifier schemes for these media types (HTML, SVG, etc). One example of such currently unmet needs is the ability to specify a range of text in an HTML document using a fragment identifier in a URL.

From the work on the Range Finder API within the Web Annotations WG, it has become increasingly clear that the ephemeral nature of web content sometimes clashes with the needs within (certain) publishing domains to have completely persistent and reliable identifiers. For example, the range of text returned by the Range Finder may change over time as the document changes; this would not be workable in for example scholarly and legal publishing.

There is not yet a URL syntax for Range Finder, but we have it on good authority that the Web Annotations WG is working on this.