Publishing@W3C News

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

Pierre

The group started with a sad topic: Pierre Danet has passed away over the week-end. The group remembered him in a few words

He was the involved in the IDPF, and the director of EDR labs, exec at Hachette. Many on this call knew him. It’s sad. Best wishes out to family.

The reason we are here is that Pierre was extremely enthusiastic about W3C. […] we owe quite a bit to him as to what we are doing now.

(See also the obituary on the W3C Blog.)

Chartering

The Working Group Charter has been approved last Friday, and the Working Group is now operational. Membership for the Interest Group participants is not transferred automatically, everybody (including invited experts) must join that group explicitly. See

• Joining form
• Invited Expert request form

The biggest problem with the charter as we put it forward was that the scope section was considered too vague—a mix up of goals and very specific things that we are supposed to deliver. This became a problem for companies that have major patent portfolios. The way it was re-written, we did our best to keep the content the same but make the scope bar much tighter. We extended the charter from 2.5 years to 3 years which gives us more time. That gives us the testing and checking period, which was extended because it would take a lot of work.

F2F Meeting

The meeting is “on”, see the preliminary agenda.

Async working tools for the WG

There was a short discussion on how to ensure async work in the group, i.e., ensure discussion between calls. The group will consider other tools (Slack, discourse, IRC) although the habit of usage GitHub Issues may be the best practice. To be seen.

Note that the WG’s home page is actually served from a GitHub repository, meaning that the corresponding issues’s mechanism can be used for generic discussions.

Note also that there is a discourse channel that is also alive for (digital) publishing.

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

Charter status

Ivan gave a short overview. The AC review is over, there are 53 answers (which is a high number!). All of the reviews are in favor of starting this Working Group. However, there are three members who require some changes on the charter in view of the IPR issues, i.e., the W3C Patent Policy Commitments; the scope section of the charter has to be refined. This is being done by the W3C staff; plans are that all who voted will have the possibility to look at the renewed text before it is (hopefully) finally adopted. This will take 2-3 more weeks.

Work reports

ARIA related updates

DPUB AAM needs some more testing. There are two implementations, but there is still a need for some more, especially on Windows 10. Some members of this IG may be in position to do those testing. The DPUB ARIA testing is essentially done, a final report has to be generated.

All this means that DPUB ARIA and DPUB AAM may be in Proposed Rec sometimes before vacations, i.e., can be a Recommendation around September. A good way to close the IG…

Cognitive Understanding

There is a task force on personalization semantics in the APA Working Group. Though this work is primarily on vocabularies for cognitive issues, it may be of a more general interest. The approach is similar to the DPUB ARIA work (i.e., an extra ARIA vocabulary). A joint meeting will take place on Wednesday.

Extended Descriptions

The Accessibility task force worked on extended descriptions (e.g., on images). There is an active issue on github and a work by the DAISY Consortium. However, all issues are not yet solved on, e.g., the exact placement for the <details> element within the content without disturbing the visual experience. Eventually, the output will be added to the ARIA authoring practices.

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

The meeting began by welcoming back Tzviya Siegman after her maternity leave. There was a unanimous agreement that her baby is adorable…

Charter status

Ivan Herman gave a short status report on the WG Charter: there 40+ positive votes, and two objections from before. One of the two has already been dealt with, the other is still pending. There are a few days more to go before the poll closes. There is still a good hope that the Working Group can officially be announced at the beginning of June.

F2F meeting

There is now a preliminary agenda for the F2F meeting. Some discussions during the call added new items to the agenda: the importance of testing and, therefore, a discussion on the testing methodology, areas, etc (including a feeling for what the “exit criteria” will be when the time comes), organizational issues (homepage, repositories, scribing, etc.). It has been agreed that a remote participation will be offered for group members if they cannot be there in person.

Personalization discussion

There has been some discussion in past few days, initiated by a group extending ARIA towards personalization, and how that work can be combined with the ideas discussed in this group (eg, manifests). That is a discussion to happen in the upcoming Working Group (personalization is also of a great interest for the publishing work).

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

Charter status

At the time of the meeting there were 20 ‘accept’ votes, and 2 formal objections with comments. The FO-s are being commented upon and a new version of the charter is in the pipeline (see the current discussion thread). Hopefully there will be a consensus soon.

As for the 20 votes, it is a nice number but we still miss some of the major players as well as more TPI members.

PWP document title change and publication

One of the issues in the discussion was around the title of the PWP document, which suggested that this document is, in fact, the FPWD for the WP document (this was not the intention). It was agreed that the document will change its title to “Web publication for the open platform: vision and technical challenges” and to publish both that document and the UCR as IG Notes to avoid any misunderstandings.

F2F meeting location

The F2F meeting will be held at: Adobe Systems Incorporated, 1540 Broadway, 17th floor, New York, NY 10036, (see Google map).

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

Charter

At the time of the meeting, there were no open issues on the charter. (Note that since the meeting, but before writing this summary, three new issues appeared.) The plan is to get the approval of the W3M management soon (maybe this week) and then the charter may go for an official vote. The timeline is such that the working group can then start at the end of May or early June.

Latinreq

The continuation of latinreq is now part of the charter. The goal is to document the typesetting & typography traditions and rules as they evolved over 2000 years for documents using latin characters. This community things that there is lots of value in this for the Web, too; many aspects of the CSS work reuse (and should reuse in the future) these experiences.

There are lots of work, but it cannot be dependent on one person only, so the Working Group will have to begin by planning and recruiting volunteers to continue and complete this work.

The Publishing Business Group has had a F2F meeting on the 13th of March, and also had its first teleconference yesterday. The minutes of both meetings are now public:

• F2F Meeting Minutes (on 2017-03-13, in London)
• Minutes of the first teleconference (on 2017-03-29)

The discussions, on both meetings, concentrated mostly on the development of the Publishing Working Group (draft) charter.

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

EPUB Summit, PBG F2F

Garth reported on the EPUB Summit 2017, which was a very successful event, with more participants than last year. Lots of presentations on the usage of EPUB, on Readium LCP. Laurent Le Meurs posted a summary.

This was followed by a Publishing BG F2F in London (the minutes of the meeting are also available); that meeting took care of most of the issues in the WG charter. (See full issue list). B.t.w., the WG’s name has been changed to “Publishing WG”.

There was also a discussion on the future of this Interest Group. The feeling is that it will wind down when its charter expires (October 2017), and the work will migrate to the Working Group. The only work in this IG that must continue and has not yet been decided upon is the work on Latinreq; it has been agreed to add this as a possible WG Note output of the Working Group.

Timeline

The group also discussed the timeline of deliverables that must be added to the charter. There has been a proposal before the IG call and that seemed to be reasonable; it is what is in the charter draft now.

Planned WG F2F Dates and place

With the shift in chartering the original schedule for a F2F early June is not possible. The current target dates are June 22-23, either in NYC or Paris. A poll will be set up to see what the preferences are in the group.