Meeting minutes
Welcome Wolfgang to the Committee
Tzviya: Wolfgang will be joining Mateus and Zheng to co-chair the Publishing CG
Wolfgang: my focus is on XML
and XML technology, in particular conversions using XSLT, etc.
… I am co-author of the IDPF glossaries spec
… happy to assist and chair the CG
… I use XML every day
… even a bit of XProc
… my main tool is XSLT
… I use a lot of XQuery too
Tzviya: great that you're joining us
Report on the planned BG Community Day event
Tzviya: we'd like to hear more about the plans
Liisa: we're doing 2
90-minute sessions on February 1
… extending each of our regular sessions by 30 minutes
Cristina: we will invite the
CEO of @@ ; a platform for delivering digital comics and manga
… digital comics is moving in Italy and elsewhere
… there is a European project on digital comics
… I will contact someone from Japan to speak on that
as well
… it is one of the fastest-growing markets in
publishing, particularly in trade
Liisa: we're also working on
pulling together some panel discussion on education
… working on finalizing speakers
… and looking to have an open dialog on other topics,
with some breakouts
… welcome ideas on topics
Bill: does "education" refer to higher ed, k12, or both?
Liisa: what's happened in the last 2 years; where is the business going?
Tzivya: Karen Myers asked if an agenda could be published asap, even a draft, so she can recruit more participants
Liisa: we'd like to record
the session
… not the breakout rooms
… hoping for 3-4 breakouts
… want one of us in each breakout to facilitate
… hoping to let people choose which breakout they
attend
George: the global certified
accessible content that's hitting higher ed is beautiful stuff
… I can reach out to Michael Johnson if you like
Liisa: that would be great
<Bill_Kasdorf> +1 to George
George: I'll give him some background and ask him to get in touch with Liisa directly
WendyR: in Zoom breakout rooms the captioning doesn't work
Tzviya: ideas for breakout
topics?
… breakouts tend to work out well when they follow up
on the discussion that you just had
… there's a lot of opinions on comics
… perhaps breakouts following up on comics and
textbooks
… if the presenters are talking about the technical
parts
Ralph: +1
George: we're about
publishing, not just EPUB
… there's the issue of journals, which are really
important and many companies have 'download as EPUB'
… I wonder if that area needs to be explored more
… and a11y in journals is something that needs
attention
Tzviya: [with Wiley hat]
individual journal articles aren't very popular to users as EPUBs
… maybe for a future Community Day we could invite
someone from Atypon to talk about journal articles
… most publishers make their journal articles
available as HTML
… best practices for HTML would be a good future
discussion
George: publishers also offer download as PDF, so ... as EPUB should happen
Zheng: I can talk about
conversion from HTML to EPUB as a use example
… is there any common general use example that I can
try out?
… to demonstrate my conversion tool -- which is on
GitHub
George: we'd be very
interested in looking at that and see how well it conforms to the a11y
specs
… metadata might be hard
Zheng: yes; I'd like to look at that
Liisa: we'd wondered if
there's room in the Community Day to understand more about news and
newspapers and how people are dealing with that in their workflow,
best practices, etc.
… that might be a future Community Day
… WaPo had been present in the BG but hasn't attended
recently
Bill: look at PLOS; many journals are open access now
Bill: another organization
is IPTC; a news media SDO
… I could provide many potential speakers for news if
you wish
Tzivya: news is very different from [scholarly] journals
<Bill_Kasdorf> +1 to Tzviya
Tzivya: the way content is
generated is very different
… several of us know lots of people in each world
… they're treated very differently
… EPUB has not taken off in either of these and is not
likely to
… we can discuss if they are looking for further
specifications
Liisa: Daihei has said that
he's hearing in Japan that they are happy with EPUB and are looking
for business opportunities in content
… that's why they're trying to understand how all this
other stuff happens
… looking at workflows
<zheng_xu__> The tool I
mentioned to convert html to epub: https://
Tzviya: we have some interesting ideas for future seminars
[Dave joins]
Community Group user stories
Mateus: At the CG meeting
this week, Zheng, Wolfgang and i introduced a new idea for
collaborating
… anyone who is documenting requirements for new
publishing use cases
… the BG could be one of those collaborations
… one idea is to share a template that documents use
cases
… to do that, document requirements as user stories
… so what we would like to do in the CG is to collect
use cases as they come up
… like when we learn of a new idea
… when we file them, we do so using a common template
… it's a statement that goes like "As a [user], I want
to [something] so that [goal]"
… an example "as an instructor, I want to annotate my
text with my students, so I can drive engagement in my course"
… unified language in the requirements
… and in a way that avoids us jumping to a solution
and instead focuses on the problems and centers on the user
… who will benefit
… might help us target specific parts of the community
better
… we'd like to work with the BG on use cases we
already know about
… we'll document them in the CG GH as individual
issues
… beyond that, we can start identifying how to dig
into these issues
… incubate, document more details, etc
Mateus: Hopefully we can use this in our upcoming meetings
Ralph: This is brilliant
… it's important to teach W3C community how to do this
kind of user story
… too many of us instantly go to solutions
… kudos to the CG
Tzviya: this is sometimes
called the Connextra template ^^
… we also give such examples from EPUB
… "as a reader I'd like to be able to jump to chapter
7 so that ..."
… that might be done by a ToC but we don't say "as a
reader I want a Table of Contents"
Liisa: did Daihei reach out to schedule time next week for us to work through scheduling a joint CG+BG meeting and move forward on some of these cases?
Mateus: not yet
… but I have some availability next week
Liisa: noon ET on Wednesday?
Mateus: unfortunately that
doesn't work for me
… as Ralph noted, not everyone is used to this way of
framing problems
… there's definitely some back-and-forth in writing
user stories and I don't view that as a problem
… the CG is happy to help people write stories in this
way
… and we're planning to write some of the EPUB
examples as user stories to help people get used to thinking in this
way
<wolfgang> +1 to Mateus
Tzviya: and others of us can
help in directing the conversation to the actual problem to solve
rather than a particular solution
… and "user" can be "machine" too; a reading system
Liisa: this gets me back to
something we talked about here several months ago
… I'm still seeing questions out there questions on
what is good a11y for EPUBs on very specific content scenarios
… and not having a place for a broad dialog
… e.g. we made some changes to the way we deal with
indices
… we noticed that sometimes an index entry goes to a
[foot|end] note
… we wondered what is the right thing for a11y; what
is the right place to go?
… we need a place to have that discussion
Tzviya: it's fine to have
that discussion in the BG
… we haven't had a place to discuss best practices
… best practices might be different for different
cases
… I'm not sure I want to commit to writing best
practices
… but ARIA APG will add examples from DPUB-ARIA
… how to tag an endnote properly with ARIA may take
years
Zheng: that's a good example
to define a use case
… I'm happy to help transforming that into a use case
… it would be a good start to write it down as a story
… in this kind of format
… and document it as a GitHub issue
WendyR: this sounds like
something that is in the realm of the CG A11y task force
… we're doing some similar work in the FXL TF, but
only for fixed layout
… we've put together some use cases for the different
types of fixed layout
… it sounds like a fun CG project
George: having a user story
around the index issue I think would be great
… I would imagine that comments added for a11y would
add more detail to the use case
… no only do you want to get there but you want to get
back to where you left off reading
… I'm not seeing that in most reading systems now
… how do I go back; breadcrumbs or history
… one use case could spawn more use cases and all
usually have an a11y component
Avneesh: George is on
target; we have to be sure that the use cases work for people with
disabilities
… our thinking is that the Publishing CG is a good
place for a broader discussion on prioritizing dpub-aria work
… @@ doesn't work because of screen reader buffering
issues
<Zakim> tzviya, you wanted to mention making these user stories accessible
Avneesh: there are technical issues that don't allow us to achieve what we want
Tzviya: I attended some a11y
training that talks about building a11y into the template
… I can try to incorporate what I learned into writing
those templates
Liisa: maybe this opens an
opportunity for us; what PRH considers best practice might not be what
others consider best practice, even though both are accessible
… maybe there's an opportunity to share what people
think they have solved and what problems they are running into
… do you push forward with what you think are good
practices despite it not always working in all reading systems
George: thinking of some
things I want to see in digital publishing; I could spend a half day
filling out templates
… I wonder if there are already use cases documented
that people could review to avoid duplication
<avneeshsingh> huge pile of web publications use cases
Zheng: good point
… we can check out how to group the user stories
… the CG meeting this week was trying to talk about
user stories
… a next step could be to look at how to group them
… to define user stories in a format more efficiently
and reduce duplication
Ralph: As I said at the
start, I'm glad you're taking this approach
… what is your dream of how this will ramp up?
Ralph: what is your dream about how this will ramp up?
Mateus: my dream is that we
have every idea, every problem that publishing is trying to solve with
digital publishing technology and standards document in this form
… so we're really understanding use cases from a very
practical perspective
… one of our challenges is that we know what we'd like
to do but we haven't had a shared language to communicate
… once we have a shared way of documenting use cases
it will become clear who can help us evolve them further
… if we have a user story documented, regardless of
what solution(s) come forward, it will help us know who can help us
… e.g. the A11y TF might be the best place to move a
particular use case for discussion
… at the least it will stimulate conversation, as it
did here
Wolfgang: my dream is to
start with the customer
… we started working with design thinking, taking
hours to talk with customers -- what are your needs? what do you
wish to get?
<mateus> +1
Wolfgang: get more customer/user-centric
<wendyreid> +1 to wolfgang!!
<tzviya> +1
Wolfgang: our customers
don't think in terms of spec and programming; they think in terms of
issues
… we should do our best to cater for them
… after that we work on finding solutions
<zheng_xu__> +1
Avneesh: it's fairly good to
have user stories and customers there
… but the structure of W3C doesn't involve users so
much; we talk about browser engines, developers, ...
… are we expecting the Publishing CG to have more
engagement with users or that the publishers will represent the
users?
WendyR: Avneesh is not wrong
… I 100% agree
… we use "user" a lot but almost never involve users
in spec writing
… part of this is that we do not have access to users;
we don't have a user advocacy group
… I'd love to start this
… I'd love to try, and encourage others to try, to see
how much user request information I can filter from my own daily
contact with people who read books
… most platforms have information about what users are
asking for and what frustrations they have
… a lot of comments we get are specific; "I don't like
your login page", others are very general "I don't like this book"
… I'd love to see how we might share some of that
information
<Zakim> tzviya, you wanted to ask if BG can involve users
Tzviya: thanks for raising
this point, Avneesh
… this template is still excellent
… I'm hoping the BG has more access to users
… some of the BG and WG participants have closer
access to users
… I hear from customers that 2FA gets in their way all
the time
… it would be valuable to document that
Zheng: how we define a
story; "as a reader ..." or "as a publisher ..." or "as a content
creator ..."
… the different roles can be expressed in different
user stories
… if we can define "user" as "who needs a feature",
that helps to get things clear
Ivan: I am a little worried
that we will get lots of use cases and to make some manageable
recommendation out of that is not an easy task to do
… many groups have done this in various use cases in
the past
<ivan> Web Publications Use Cases and Requirements
Ivan: it's complicated to
distill from them some tangible directions
… years ago we attempted to try to find a structure to
distill information out of use cases
… we might be looking for something more elaborate
than the use cases in ^^
… we have to keep in mind how to get a manageable
collection of things
Tzviya: in the ^^ document
each use case is very complicated
… we can break them down into simpler stories
[adjourned]