W3C’s Digital Publishing Interest Group

Some History

Today, 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, the printed version is even 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 the technologies developed at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), 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. In general one can say that the Publishing Industry is one of the largest communities relying on a large palette of W3C technologies.

Publishing has also high technical demands, for example in typesetting and graphics, high-level interactivity, and rich media. The experience in aesthetics and ergonomy that the Publishing Industry has accumulated over centuries should not be lost in this new era. However, groups at standards bodies, like the W3C, know little about the detailed requirements of publishers, as that industry did not contribute to the development of these foundational standards. The Publishing Industry has, mostly, been behaving in a fairly “passive” mode when it came to technology development. Technology oriented groups at W3C (or other standardization bodies) work with the requirements they know of and with the experts who join the groups; if the Digital Publishing Industry is not present around the table, the features it needs will not be considered. This leads to fragmentation, interoperability issues, and a disconnect between the Publishing Industry and, for example, the browser world.

Recognizing this problem the W3C and IDPF organized a series of Workshops in 2013 (in New York, Tokyo, and in Paris) to address this issue. This led to the establishment, in May 2013, of the Digital Publishing Activity and, in June 2013, the Digital Publishing Interest Group was formally chartered. The mission of the Group states:

The mission of the Digital Publishing Interest Group (DPUB IG) […] a forum for experts in the digital publishing ecosystem […] for technical discussions, gathering use cases and requirements to align the existing formats and technologies (e.g., for electronic books) with those used by [W3C’s] Open Web Platform.

What does this mean in practice? The DPUB IG brings publishing experts together to identify issues that are not, or not adequately, addressed by the current generation of W3C technologies. These issues and requirements are documented and contacts are established with relevant Working Groups at the W3C who update or develop specifications based on these information. The Interest Group gathers experts from various companies and institutions, including professional publishers, like Wiley, Hachette, and Pearson, industry groups or non-profit institutions like the BISG, IDPF, or the Daisy Consortium, technology companies, like IBM, Google, Rakuten, Antenna House, or Apple, and academic institutions, like the University of Illinois or Ghent University.

Task Forces and Highlights

Obviously, the job of the DPUB IG is huge and complex; to manage those a set of Task Forces has been created. The choice of the task forces reflect the participants’ interest, and the approach they have taken in doing their work differ among task forces. The current task forces are as follows.

• The Pagination and Layout Task Force looks at the requirements publishers have on styling and pagination, beyond what the current Web technologies already provide,. These include hyphenation, drop caps, running headers and footers, or pagination control. The Task Force has published a document entitled “Requirements for Latin Text Layout and Pagination” (the document is still a draft and new releases are to be expected) and members of the Task Force are also active participants of the CSS Working Group at W3C. The Task Force has contributed to the  CSS Inline Layout Module Level 3, a Working Draft that enables drop caps and stick-up caps in CSS. At the moment, one of the major focus of the group is to work, together with the CSS Working Group, on standardizing pagination information and control.
• The Metadata Task Force has published a Note based on industry interviews with representatives of various sectors and roles within the publishing ecosystem. The fundamental question was whether the technologies offered by the W3C are appropriate to cover the Metadata needs of the Industry and what W3C can contribute in that particular area. The report establishes that the the main areas of possible action for the W3C are in outreach, technical discussions on how current technologies may and should be used, rather than the development of new specifications.
• The Content and Markup Task Force is working on an approach providing a standard way to add logical structures and information on top of (but staying compatible with) HTML. Examples are the identification of glossaries, footnotes, and (mathematical) proofs. The Task Force is working with W3C’s Protocols and Formats Working Group, which oversees extensions of HTML through standard attributes using a technology called ARIA; these attributes, and the extensions thereof, may be used to describe the content of an HTML file. An interesting aspect of the work is that ARIA had been originally developed for Web Accessibility; by binding the structural markup to ARIA an improved accessibility in eBooks is also achieved.
• The Accessibility Task Force concentrates on accessibility guidelines. W3C has defined a number of Accessibility Guidelines (for Web Content Authors,  Authoring Tools, and User Agents) but, as emphasized in the introduction, these guidelines were typically developed without the participation of the Digital Publishing Industry. This Task Force should fill the gap by reviewing those guidelines and, possibly, suggest new features or alternative formulations. Steps may also be taken to advise and educate the Publishing Industry about more actively using these documents.
• The STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Medicine) Task Force conducted initial interviews with industry experts and will send out a extensive survey by the end of the month to refine the information gathered in the interviews. STEM is a broad category, and the Task Force is looking to understand which areas are unique to STEM publishing. An example for a specific issue possibly arising is whether standard file formats for specific needs (e.g., for chemical formulae) should be standardized by W3C.

One more Task Force is worth mentioning, although that Task Force is not active in this Interest Group any more. This is the Annotation Task Force. This Task Force collected and published an extensive set of use cases and requirements on Web annotations, a feature that is considered to be critical for, e.g., scholarly publishing. This work has now been spawned into a separate Annotation Working Group, whose charter is to define a standard model for annotation exchange, access, and addressing. It is interesting to note that the Annotation Working Group is the first W3C Group that is based on the active cooperation of traditional Web Developers, Browser developers, and representatives of the Publishing Industry.

What's Next?

In addition to these activities, experts of W3C and of IDPF have also published a white paper entitled "Advancing Portable Documents for the Open Web Platform: EPUB-WEB". This (unofficial) paper outlines a vision of portable documents as native citizens of the Web. Quoting from the white paper:

Our vision for EPUB-WEB 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 (EPUB) and online (Web) 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. Content authored primarily for use as a portable document can be put online, without any need for refactoring the content. 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.

EPUB-WEB may have a profound influence in a number of areas of publishing, including educational or scholarly publishing, electronic books, in-house documentation systems, and of course the way users manage documents on the Web. In the coming months, we will concentrate on whether and how this overall vision can be put in practice and whether this vision will result in working on a next generation of EPUB format that might reconcile the worlds of the Web and Publishing. At the moment, the focus is on gathering comments, identify further technical challenges as well issues touching on feasibility. If both the W3C and IDPF decide to go ahead, this may result in a major activity in around a year from now. (By the way, the authors welcome issues and comments from anyone, using the github issue system). The role of the current Digital Publishing Interest Group may prove to be crucial in this process by participating in the discussion leading up to a possible specification work.