Meeting minutes
<Ivan Herman> Date: 2024-04-05
Wendy Reid: Welcome to the PMWG, we have a guest today
jaclyn_retallick: I work at Rakuten Kobo with Wendy Reid, I'm an intern at the QA team
<Wendy Reid> https://
Publishing the FXL A11y WG Draft Note
Wendy Reid: there's been a join task force between PMWG and Publishing CG
… with the focus to produce guidelines to make FXL ebooks more accessible
… the question today is to make the note published as a draft note, to get a broader review
… this document is a practice and recomandations document
… it will have a techniques document where we'll list how to achieve the goals proposed
George Kerscher: before we approve this (6 month from now), do we aspect to have authoring tools or publishers or reading systems that will support it?
Wendy Reid: because it's a note it doesn't require the process of the rec, so is not required to have implementations
… at the same time we based our suggestions from real life ebooks and tools
George Kerscher: do we want to test it?
<Avneesh Singh> It would be helpful to know what draft note mean. Does it mean that structure of note is freezed, or is it a more mature version of editor's draft, and structure can be revisited?
Wendy Reid: it's not mandatory, but may help
Wendy Reid: it's a more mature version of an editors' draft
… having it published as TR we'll make it more visible
Ivan Herman: the difference between a draft note and a note is more on the naming, then on the content or the stability of the document
Dale0: I asked big retailers specs about FXL, they sent me links both to new and old version of EPUB
Wendy Reid: Yes, I know that documents, reading systems normally try to support all versions of EPUBs
Gregorio Pellegrino: Two questions, before publishing as a draft note, do we want a short period of review for this group?
… one of the last notes about accessibility exemptions, we requested an OK from APA, since we speak about Accessibility, do we need to ask them to review?
Ivan Herman: to the second question, we have no requirements to ask for an horizontal review
… I'm comfortable in publishing it now as a draft note
… as an aside I asked Kevin and Shawn to ask them a review
Avneesh Singh: APA review may not be important for a process point of view, but maybe before the official release may be good to ask them a review
… maybe we can ask also to the AG WG
… since WCAG are involved
… for the time to review I suggest 2-3 weeks for internal review
Tzviya Siegman: I think that publish the draft note doesn't impede us from update it later
Wendy Reid: is there any concern in publish it?
… I think it's ok to publish it in draft note status
Ivan Herman: I understand the reactions, but I would prefer to publish the note to make it known by the world
… the document is under discussion from fairly long time, so I think it is the right time now
Avneesh Singh: two things, I think we should ask APA before publish it as "official" note
… I think an internal review should be useful, having the notice about it 10 days ago would be great
… it's ok that for the task force the document is fine
Wendy Reid: we ave a publishing moratorium next week, but we may move it to the end of the month
Shinya Takami: I agree to publish it as a draft note, so it's more easy to have feedback from DAISY Japan
Ivan Herman: I propose to do something in the middle, I propose to vote via email for publishing the note
… everybody in two weeks reviews the note and in two weeks we take the decision about publishing it
Wendy Reid: I agree I can send it at the end of the meeting
… asking for review
Gregorio Pellegrino: In the meantime, we still have the monday meetings of the TF, we can meet there and discuss there, we don't need the WG call to discuss
Webtoons discussion cont.
Wendy Reid: we would like to find some kind of consensus
Ivan Herman: on the GitHub comments Hadrien proposed a possible solution, but it requires to add a new normative feature in the spec, and we are not allowed by the charter
… I propose to put this charter question aside and we try to find the best solution based on consensus
… at the end if the best solution requires to change the charter we can work on it
Shinya Takami: the Japanese community doesn't want a new feature for publishing webtoons
… but if most people in the group want it, I'm not against it
Wendy Reid: I think one problem here is that we don't have enough knowledge about webtoons outside Japan
Tzviya Siegman: we had a long discussion, we said that the user may select the preferred way to read ebooks (scroll o paginated)
… the webtoons that are being printed are paginated
Hadrien Gardeur: for that content what you don't want to do is to have a page with a little content in the middle
… the problem is how to move forward and backward
… in a smartphone does the content have to fit the width?
… using reflow or FXL doesn't matter, they both don't work in this way
Laurent Le Meur: tzviya said that is not about reading systems capabilities, it's about semantics
… in pre-paginated we speak about pages, and a viewport
… in webtoons we speak about tiles, each with different dimensions
… those are two different things
… if we want to use EPUB for webtoons (it's fine), but we need another approach
… if we use FXL a reading system will display tiles in "pages", with edges
… so I think we cannot use the pre-paginated world for webtoons
Shinya Takami: it depends: rendition-flow: scroll-continuos is for us a sign to say that the EPUB is a webtoons
… because we don't have another value to express it
Wendy Reid: a lot of these are coming down to implementations and reading systems
… however a lot of these will come down to user preferences and how they prefer to read content
… I can read with scroll both for reflowable content and FXL
<Tzviya Siegman> +1 to Wendy Reid
Wendy Reid: we just want to give the content creator the ability to signal that scroll is the preferred way to consume that content
Hadrien Gardeur: I'm trying to list requirements at high level:
… you want to have content that fits the full with of the viewport
… you want to list tiles on attached to the other (without borders)
… you want to access the whole content by scrolling it
… for this I think that the pre-paginated UX is not the good one
… an additional thing is how to deal with series and collections
… reflowable is all on the power of the user
… FXL is based on control by the content creator and as the assumption that you see the whole "page" in the viewport when you load it
… I think the UX would be much better if there is something specific, then using the FXL
Ivan Herman: the current disagreement is that some publishers are using a undefined combination of proprierties to signal that a content is a webtoon
<Laurent Le Meur> +1 to Ivan Herman, that is right
<Hadrien Gardeur> +1 to Ivan Herman, that's a good summary
Ivan Herman: what Hadrien says is to create a new value to express clearly what publishers want
Tzviya Siegman: I think we are discussing all the same thing in these meetings; we have publishers already doing it, we have to help them.
Shinya Takami: I think we don't need a new feature, we are already using it, changing the old content may be challenging
Ivan Herman: the way I understand it, is not to add requirements for new features in the reading system, but to better express the content nature
Laurent Le Meur: I understand that in Japan the prototype was developed and coming to the standard body, and here the discussion is happening
… is good to have the prototype, now let's find a good way to express it
Wendy Reid: maybe we can do this iteratively
… we have also to think about expanding EPUB
… but this is only part of the solution
… right now it may be a little bit rough, but with better metadata, and OPF organization and etc. we can improve the UX
Hadrien Gardeur: in reflowable is the user that decides how to read the content, we have seen few EPUBs using rendition-flow in the wild, and fewer reading systems supporting it
… I think that extending something that is poorly implemented in reflow is not a good idea to expand it to FXL