Meeting Summary 2015-02-02

Meeting minutes: http://www.w3.org/2015/02/02-dpub-minutes.html

Main discussions

EPUB-WEB planning

The EPUB-WEB white paper was discussed at the TPAC meeting. It paints a vision for a future scenario of digital publishing, where off-line and on-line versions of a digital document are only a state of the same. It is a modernized view of portable document, anchored in OWP. To be clear, this is a white paper, a first attempt for a future vision; there is no WG behind it, it is not a rec-track document. An accompanying article that discusses prerequisites, possible time lines, expectation, etc, is worked on by Bill McCoy and Ralph Swick. When that is available (sometimes second half of February) we plan to make a bigger outreach around it.

One of the important points to emphasize is the relationship to current IDPF/EPUB work. Indeed, the evolution of EPUB3 is the dominating work at IDPF right now, and aims at a backward compatible evolution of EPUB3 with regard to, eg., reading systems. On the other hand, EPUB-WEB is a long term vision, altough many items that can be discussed within the framework of EPUB-WEB (e.g., structural semantics) will find its way into EPUB3.X already.

It will be important, in the coming period, to add more details to the White Paper, in terms of use cases, functional requirements, in terms of the technical content (which is still sketchy at the moment). It is also important to ensure that the right stakeholders are involved, both on the publishing side, but also (as came up during discussion) from the browsers' side. Any comments on the White Paper are important (and the IG members are encouraged to give their comments, eg, through the Github Issue tracker).

Many of the works in the current IG task forces are highly relevant to EPUB-WEB already. Examples are the pagination and styling work (including the Hudini project review), the structural semantics, or the output of the metadata task force. The goal is that EPUB-WEB issues would also shape the work of the task forces. Furthermore, some new task forces (or simply interested group of people from the IG) could also focus on:

• Packaging issues; the discussion has already begun, and it is important for the IG to contribute to the corresponding WG discussions
• Linking and identification; the Metadata task force, that did get to an equilibrium point, could probably pick up this topic.

Discussion also referred to the importance of expectation management, reaching out to browser vendors, or finer details on personalization. The importance of outreach was also discussed, including the participation of BISG in the process. Finally, the importance of dealing with security and privacy issues was also emphasized; an outreach to the relevant W3C domain will be done to help that process.

Task forces

Accessibility

The TF met with a number of people twice a week, started on the WCAG spec, identifying relevance. There are around a dozen of main topic areas; the reviewers have classified them with comments. Many volunteers have been listed, but not many have enough time...

STEM

The survey should be sent to a first group of people within a few days.

Structural semantics

Lots of discussions with the PF group; a first document with the DPUB ARIA module should be available in February

Pagination, Hudini comments

There are feedbacks on the wiki page, and we are approaching a point when a more widespread review will be sollicited