W3C Launches New Digital Publishing Activity

Today W3C launched a new Digital Publishing Activity to make the Web a platform for the digital publishing industry, and to build the necessary bridges between the developers of the Open Web Platform and the publishing industry.

Today's eBook readers and tablets for electronic books, magazines, journals and educational resources use W3C technologies such as (X)HTML, CSS, SVG, SMIL, MathML, or various Web API-s. Commercial publishers also rely on W3C technologies in their back-end processing all the way from authoring through to delivering the printed or electronic product and beyond.The publishing industry is one of the largest consumers of W3C technology.

Work in this activity primarily takes place in the Digital Publishing Interest Group. That Interest Group is a forum for experts in the digital publishing ecosystem of electronic journals, magazines, news, or book publishing (authors, creators, publishers, news organizations, booksellers, accessibility and internationalization specialists, etc.) for technical discussions, gathering use cases and requirements to align the existing formats and technologies (e.g., for electronic books) with those used by the Open Web Platform.

The launch of this Activity follows two W3C Workshops this year so far: Great Expectations for Web Standards (February) and Richer Internationalization for eBooks (June). W3C is also holding a Workshop on publishing workflow in September in Paris.