Meeting minutes
Salon report
Ralph: do we have a place to continue the conversation asynchronously on how to organize the possible work ?
<tzviya> https://
Ivan: identify what needs more incubation
Tzviya: let's use the CG repo ^^ and create issues there
Wolfgang: I'll make a label to identify potential charter issues
Wolfgang: in terms of the
size of a topic, if you look at what may be in W3C and want to write a
note does that need a group charter?
… for a precise issue in the wide realm of Publishing,
where is the threshold to decide if you make it a charter?
Ralph: I don't think we can
answer that in a general way
… have to consider it issue-by-issue
Tzviya: and we shouldn't spend a lot of time worrying about that at this point
George: is the question of
standardizing on a manifest a way of approaching publishing as HTML ?
… if we have a standard for manifest that has some
required elements, such as ToC, is that a poor-man's way of getting
into web publications?
Tzviya: manifest already exists but yes, it is
Tzivya: I recently commented
about concern that higher ed seems to be stepping away from EPUB
… my pitch was to look at a manifest for the course
and at a mechanism to have a unified mapping to EPUB
George: do you see higher ed moving to course development as what is driving the move away from EPUB?
Tzviya: courses and books
have been the same
… now the book is being delivered in pieces in a more
integrated approach
… e.g. a piece of a calculus book with the student
assessments delivered as part of that, all on-line
… it's not a "book" per se but it still needs to be
known as "the calculus course"
… that's where the mapping comes in
Bill: +1; I work with a lot
of higher ed clients right now
… on manifest and publishing as HTML, the same can be
said about scholarly publishing
… when I point people, especially technical people, at
the publishing manifest they say it's exactly what they want
… we were asked exactly this question recently by
scientific journal publishers; the answer is that accessible HTML is
preferred
… I think the publication manifest will be really
useful
Avneesh: I am also a fan of
the publication manifest
… the wall we hit last time is lack of traction
… can we determine whether those who like it are ready
to drive it forward?
Tzviya: we know some are
already using it
… it's not exactly RS implementations
… we have to figure out what implementation tests
would be
… more driven by publishers than RSs
… our step now is to log this as an issue in the CG
and see use cases
… we're not asking for magic from the manifest; it's a
list of stuff
Ivan: for those who use it, what do they use it for?
Tzviya: some use it in their
internal courseware systems
… it can have additional metadata
… the pubmanifest can have audiobook-specific info
… I don't think it would be a lot of work to apply it
in higher ed
Bill: consider using JSON-LD to be able to add more semantics; particularly facilitating use of schema.org
Liisa: on traction, there
was concern that in looking at the future of EPUB people were worried
about their backlists
… we're expanding what people can do with publications
… there are a lot of possibilities
<Bill_Kasdorf> My point was that it IS JSON and the use of JSON-LD is of high interest.
Liisa: keep the use case discussion wide but also focus on what is needed in some of the education spaces
Wolfgang: happy to create the issue with Tzviya's assistance
Tzviya: I'll find some time to talk next week
Liisa: I'd like to be involved; I need help getting the task force off the ground
George: this is great; there
are some nuances that shouldn't be missed
… the notion of a "course" as opposed to a
"publication" resonates with me
… it seems like this could include "course" in its
scope; we might be able to get a lot more participation if we were
talking about course structure and allowing tests to be included
Tzviya: yes, but we're pointing to material not including it
Wolfgang: it's documentation
… you can use pubmanifest for any documentation; user
documentation for a technical gadget
… it's not restricted to types of publications
Counterfeit TF
Tzviya: we'll help Liisa set this up
Archiving and versioning
Tzviya: we talked about this
last time
… is this an area we want to try to explore? it
touches a lot of W3C
Ivan: we need lots of
external expertise on this
… we don't have it now
Tzviya: there's a NISO proposal for EPUB archiving
Ivan: this shouldn't be specific to EPUB; it's about Web archiving
Tzviya: I wish NISO had consulted with us
Ivan: yes, but doing only
EPUB archiving is a mistake
… we need to archive the software as well
Bill: I'm hoping to get
participation from "Big Ten Academic Alliance" soon
… they're much larger than ten
… and have the expertise
Tzviya: it's a huge area; we need to consider whether we want to start touching it
Liisa: there's also the
versioning question; archiving and versioning are related but separate
… we don't even know the customers' preferences on
getting updates
… and how many versions do we archive?
… this is a huge problem for meeting accessibility if
RSs aren't getting updates to users or only doing it in an adhoc
manner
… I've been chasing some issue with updates not
getting to readers
Tzviya: this relates to
serialization as well; they could be delta releases to a publication
… this gets back to addressibility; one reason RSs
might not issue updates is because it might mess up links
… we know that RSs are protective of addressibility;
it seems more likely that working on an approach to updates
including serialization and perhaps versioning through metadata
… maybe those are the two best approaches
… "versioning in a way that RSs will support"
… "serialization", where the issue right now has to do
with potential changes to annotations
… we might not be able to change this unless we get to
the heart of addressibility
Liisa: I can take these back to conversations in the BG to see if there's business interest in trying to solve any of this
Tzviya: serialization is huge in the manga world
Liisa: that's part of what
Daihei and I were hoping to get to in November
… the manga world is doing more serialization as a way
to combat piracy
Ivan: this is publishing a book chapter by chapter, not at once?
Liisa: yes, chapter by
chapter and maybe at the end a final publication
… and possibly insert at any time
… there are several business models but the technology
has to be there to support
Tzviya: in scholarly
publishing there's a notion of early view
… COVID had a big impact on this; people wanted access
to the early view
… this became an overnight change
… a lot of technology publishers have started to give
access to books as they're being written because technology changes
so quickly
… they have different names for this
Bill: E-life will be
publishing early view, an open peer review, and leave it to the author
to decide whether to revise or leave as-is
… if the author revises they publish an update
… they no longer will make the decision for the
author; that's pretty interesting
Tzviya: do we want to
document this as an addressibilty need, a serialization need, or a
versioning need?
… or all three
Liisa: start with the
business case: serialization
… if you start with addressibility people will back
off
… I'll start that issue in GH
Tzviya: so we're opening manifest, versioning, and serialization
George: explain addressibility more?
Tzviya: how you point into something
Liisa: many of the RSs say
they can't update files because that will change bookmarks and
annotations
… we need addressibility to be reliable and for
everyone to implement it consistently
George: thanks; I understand
Tzviya: from the Salon notes there is interest in metadata, even user metadata
<AvneeshSingh> +1 Ivan
Ivan: chapter-level metadata is not rocket science; we'd want to know the business interest and what exactly they expect
Tzviya: who is hearing real demand?
[silence]
Tools
Tzviya: we know there is great need but that's not something we can do in W3C
Annotations, Bookmarks, Notes
Tzviya: the W3C Annotation
spec is broad and robust
… but other than Hypothesis there's not a lot of
uptake
… what are your perceptions of where the RS market is?
… my impression is that each wants to do its own thing
… there should be interest in interoperability but
this seems to be a case where the retailers want to keep their own
Ivan: the architecture of
web annotations is to set up servers
… Hypothesis sort-of does this but I don't think they
have disclosed how to install their server elsewhere
… I have the impression that not only are RSs not
interested but they are actively opposed as this is one of the ways
they complete
… looking at side loading, one of the features I use
to distinguish is how good each annotation system is
George: accessibility of
annotation systems is a real problem
… companies implementing annotations are tortured by
a11y
… beyond a11y is usability; there's the potential of
so much complexity being added to the document that it becomes
impossible to read
… e.g. adding lots of footnotes
… I don't think the existing RSs want to use their
annotation systems to keep people in a walled garden; I think
they're struggling with how to implement a11y
Ivan: and the W3C Web Annotation Recommendation is at the protocol level, not the usability level
Liisa: we have heard there
are business cases for selling annotations
… this is something people would be interested in
doing if there is a way to do it without putting out another edition
… avoiding the problem of having multiple versions in
the market
… selling annotations as a separate add-on would be of
more interest
Ivan: and there is the addressibility issue right there
Tzviya: there's a book by
Zadie Smith with 50 footnotes in the introduction
… a lot of people will be interested in reading the
commentary on a translation
Liisa: you see this in book
club editions; they want to put their notes throughout
… there are two books on the market with Oprah Winfrey
commentary
Tzviya: and we hear about
the annotated teachers' editions
… saleable annotations could be a good use case to
bring up
… we have the specification; it's about getting
implementation uptake
… I'll add this to my list of things to document
Tzviya: and there are areas
outside of publishing
… rights
… end-user participation
… areas to collaborate within W3C; annotations,
addressibility
… a11y is an example of getting publishing people more
integrated into other parts of W3C
Next meeting?
George: will we meet on the 11th?
Tzviya: we have it on the
calendar
… I'll be in touch about the agenda
[adjourned]