Digital Publishing Interest Group Charter

Scope

Today’s digital publishing market is dynamic, fast-changing, and strong. Electronic books, or eBooks, compete with printed versions, and there is a wide choice of hardware and software available for eBook readers. Journals and magazines are also made available digitally on the web or in specialized applications and, in some cases, their printed version is abandoned in favor of a purely digital version. The formats used by eBook readers and tablets for electronic books, magazines, journals and educational resources are largely based on W3C technologies, such as (X)HTML, CSS, SVG, SMIL, MathML, or various Web APIs.

The group is a continuation, under a new charter, of the Digital Publishing Interest Group that started in 2013 and whose original charter expires in September 2015. That group has firmly established the presence of the Digital Publishing Community within W3C and, vice versa, the presence of W3C within the Digital Publishing Community. Work started by that group in the area of Accessibility, Layout & Styling, Pagination, or Content & Markup, will be continued and completed by this newly chartered group. The results of the earlier incarnation of this Interest Group will provide a strong basis for the work of this new Interest Group.

Of particular interest to this group is the advancement of EPUB. EPUB 3 already ensures the introduction of highly dynamic and interactive digital documents whose features resemble more of what the Web generally provides. This can be seen through a new breed of interactive books in, for example, the educational domain. The same technical possibilities in that domain have the potential to revolutionize such diverse areas as journal and magazine publications (including scholarly journal publishing), the archiving of Web content, and in-house publishing of documentations by large corporations.

The vision for the convergence of future of digital documents and the Web, that governs the work of this Interest Group, has also been summarized in a separate white paper entitled “Advancing Portable Documents for the Open Web Platform: EPUB+WEB” as follows:

Our vision […] is that portable documents become fully native citizens of the Open Web Platform. In this vision, the current format- and workflow-level separation between offline/portable […] and online […] document publishing is diminished to zero. These are merely two dynamic manifestations of the same publication: content authored with online use as the primary mode can easily be saved by the user for offline reading in portable document form. […] Publishers can choose to utilize either or both of these publishing modes, and users can choose either or both of these consumption modes. Essential features flow seamlessly between online and offline modes; examples include cross-references, user annotations, access to online databases, as well as licensing and rights management.

Turning this vision into reality, however, requires significant technical work. Some of the issues are already addressed in existing W3C Working Groups (e.g., the CSS, HTML5, or the Web Applications Working Groups) but it is very important that those activities take into account the use cases and requirements of the digital publishing industry through review responses, comments, and direct participation in those Working Groups. There are also a number of technical challenges specific to this vision that will also necessitate targeted specification work. A first set of technical challenges have been identified in the white paper; the most important ones are:

• General Architecture for Online/Offline Publications
• Document and fragment identification
• Styling and Layout, Pagination

However, it is not yet clear, at this moment, which of these (or other) challenges will require targeted work by this Interest Group and which should be done in cooperation with existing Working Groups. In light of this, the goal of this Interest Group is to

• provide an in-depth and exhaustive overview of the technical challenges that should be solved to make the EPUB+WEB vision a reality; and,
• determine, and take the necessary actions in the form of prototyping technical solutions or specifications, whether these challenges should be addressed through
  • new Working Groups at W3C, in which case the Interest Group will actively contribute to the chartering of those groups, or
  • cooperation with other W3C groups (in which case the Interest Group will provide feedback, comments, and requirements to those Groups to ensure the necessary convergence, and will encourage members of the Interest Group to actively participate in those Working Groups), or
  • the publication of non-normative documents, like Interest Group Notes, of prototypical technical solutions, or
  • by Working Groups at other organizations, like the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) or the Book Industry Study Group (BISG), in which case strong liaisons will established with those groups.

In addition to these work items, the Interest Group will also establish an active collaborative relationship with IDPF around the work on the EPUB 3.1. This work, in discussion to be chartered by IDPF in 2015, aims to include a number of backward compatible changes to EPUB 3.01, adding new features and deprecating others. Many of those changes aim at bringing EPUB even closer to the Open Web Platform and, thereby, contributing to the vision of EPUB+WEB. The Interest Group will act as an advisory group to IDPF on the OWP related features, as well as a conduit to other groups at W3C.

Finally, the Interest Group will also plan for outreach actions aimed at bringing the Publishing Community closer to the general development of the Open Web Platform, and to attract a larger participation in the work at W3C.

Success Criteria

The group has succeeded if

• the group has successfully completed the work started by the previous version of the Interest Group on Accessibility, Pagination, or Content & Markup;
• a clear migration path towards the vision expressed in the EPUB+WEB White Paper has been established, including a clear view of the technical challenges and issues to solve;
• a fruitful cooperation is established between the Interest Group and the relevant Working Groups at W3C, reflected by a successful harmonization between the needs of the publishing industry at large, and EPUB+WEB in particular, and constituents of the Open Web Platform;
• the group has successfully contributed establishing the Working Group(s) essential to turn the EPUB+WEB vision a reality;
• members of the Interest Group join the relevant Working Groups to participate and possibly drive the development of the specific work items that are in development and are considered to be important for the EPUB+WEB vision;
• production of stable documents addressing the work items listed in the Deliverables section;
• the Interest Group has provided useful advice and help to IDPF in developing EPUB 3.1; and,
• a productive and stable set of liaisons is set up between the Digital Publishing industry and its representative organizations like the IDPF, EDItEUR, or BISG, and the various W3C Working Groups. These liaisons should define how W3C Working Groups can request technical comments from those external organizations, and how those external organizations can convey their requirements to current and future Working Groups. These liaisons should remain active even when the Interest Group is closed.