W3C

Publishing Maintenance Working Group Telco

20 March 2025

Attendees

Present
AvneeshSingh, CharlesL, Dale_Rogers, dhall, duga, George, gpellegrino, Hadrien, ikkwong, Laura_Driussi, LaurentLM, MasakazuKitahara, sdelackner9, shiestyle, SueNeu, wendyreid, ivan
Regrets
mattgarrish, tzviya
Chair
wendyreid
Scribe
duga, wendyreid

Meeting minutes

<wendyreid> Draft F2F Agenda -> https://github.com/w3c/pm-wg/blob/main/meetings/F2FMeetingFrance2025.md

wendyreid: Let's start. I promise to bribe the scribes at the F2F
… We have a rough f2f agenda, rough because we want input
… We tried to push things later in the day for timezone reasons
… bu inria has operating hours we have to respect
… More technical stuff is afternoon for better attendance for remotes
… if there is a session you want to attend but can't, please let us know
… And let us know if we missed anything

CharlesL: Ouch, that is early

AvneeshSingh: We should be planning for the a11y TF
… I don't think we will have time for a meeting beforehand, so can we have a 45 min to 1 hr session at the f2f?
… And make sure the CharlesL and George can make that time

gpellegrino: We are changing times in Europe, so the times may be wrong

wendyreid: [updating the times]

CharlesL: Fixed layout a11y will be pushed to afternoon?

wendyreid: Yes, that will probably be what happens

wendyreid: We have a new person! Seh, introductions?

seth: I've been working with Dave for years
… I need to help Dave with spec work, since he has other things on his plate

dhall: My roles have changed inernally, so Seth will help, but I will stick around

Footnotes and Extended Descriptions - w3c/epub-specs#2690

<wendyreid> w3c/epub-specs#2691

wendyreid: footnotes have come up a couple of times on the list, and gpellegrino opened an issue on extended descriptions
… these are very similar issues
… There was once a philosophical decision that epub would explain how to make the metadata, etc, but we wouldn't tell them how to actually write their books
… We are now seeing there is confusion around features, how to do them well and interchangeably

<wendyreid> w3c/publishingcg#77

wendyreid: There are probably more issues than just footnotes and extended desc
… I opened an issue to see if there are other things that would benefit from having an approach

<gpellegrino> cover page!

SueNeu: Most of my projects don't let me push the envelope very much
… can we think of this in two ways, one as a best practices doc, and another for people who want to be more creative?
… We have also matured, RS have really taken over the UX side
… I am not sure I would want to push the envelope for most titles

Hadrien: Constraints can be liberating

<SueNeu> +1

Hadrien: Without constraints we can't provide some features

<gpellegrino> +1 to Hadrien

Hadrien: setting constraints actually makes features possible

wendyreid: Because of the interconnectedness of content and RS, what is the best approach for producing the document?

<Dale> +1 to Hadrien

wendyreid: It isn't a huge change to add best practices, but it is huge o put it in the spec

gpellegrino: I think a note is the right thing
… the same as 1.1 a11y techniques doc. Notes are easier to update
… though, with a note we can really check implementations

AvneeshSingh: I am reluctant to at user experience mandaes to the spec
… if we need a normative change we should start from ux

<SueNeu> +1

duga: We've certainly had a philosophical position of not mandating UX, except for the times we do (FXL)
… not sure if it's philosophical or practical, footnotes had epub:type for a long time
… but it also caused RMSDK to crash, and it was the main way books were displayed for a long time
… we didn't understand the consequences of the decision, and now we have a mess where people avoided using epub:type
… and there's endnotes vs footnotes, we're not picking one or the other, not something we can dictate
… we did dictate it, and it didn't work, and we created a problem, but it's hard to put in the spec, we don't know what will crash tomorrow

ivan: I must admit, it is difficul to put this into practice coming from the web
… if we put constrains, then are we fighting with what html says to do?
… hml5 goes into extreme detail since it reverse engineers what actually happened in browsers
… how would a RS constraint work? Are we splitting the web?
… If I do a note with best practices, that is fine, but if it is normative it is scary

Hadrien: There is already a lot we do that isn't the web (e.g pagination)
… So this is already the reality
… So footnotes is probably better as best practices
… We already live in a world where we diverge
… But things like popup footnotes are a problem, since they work one way on one platform and differently on another

gpellegrino: We also have spine and TOC which is different from the web
… We need guidance on how to mark things up
… Without proper markup RS have to try and guess which causes problems

<ivan> +1 to gregorio

gpellegrino: the bar shouldn't be on the RS implementation, but on what we expect from authors

<Hadrien> +1 to what gpellegrino just said

<LaurentLM> +1 to Gregorio

wendyreid: We want to push content creators to use html to the full extent
… And we don't see that much today
… Some books are just endless P tags, with different styles
… There is also dpub-aria which is under utilised
… Content creators often don't know what will happen if they use it

AvneeshSingh: Footnote, extended desc, these are important for a11y
… when they change it causes confusion
… We need conformance reqs
… for instance, we need a way to get back from footnotes
… this can be broad guidance

wendyreid: It is helpful for RS implementors to get things in a standard way - implementors know what things would be good here

ivan: So we start with some sort of note, say best practices, keeping an eye on whether we need new things in the spec (eg epub types)
… but I am not seeing much need for normative changes

wendyreid: I think that is right

CharlesL: Another thing is page breaks, they all seem to be different

duga: On the reading system normative side, I think there are some
… being able to go back from a footnote, that's a normative thing we might want to say
… it's strange, but there might be something to add there
… another thing might be the display of footnotes in popups, most RSs display the text, but footntoes aren't used in Japan, they have ruby
… we could make normative statements, if you display a popup, use the HTML
… we can spec all we want, but if there is no one doing it, it may not matter
… we shouldn't be too prescriptive, we should respect the content

CharlesL: Also linking in general, the web already has a back buton
… having a RS mimic that has been missing
… for instance one to many links are hard to author correctly wihout rs back funcionality

Hadrien: For back affordance, there are some RS that have history
… sometimes there is contextual back, usually for following links
… Apple set implementation for popups, but displaying the content richly is really hard
… styling, for instance, is really hard
… No one has managed to do popup + styled

shiestyle: Japanese content is pretty complex, so we generally refrain from footnotes

SueNeu: Ebooks may also diverge on location in the documen
… sometimes we need to be able o point back to a printed item

ivan: Annotation popups will be an issue

CharlesL: And footnote popup can be extended to ext desc
… So guidance there would be great
… WW Norton (Evan Yamanishi) did some experiments with that back in the day
… maybe we can use those as examples

AOB

ivan: Practical point - how should we handle zooms for TFs? Should we use the same or use new ones?

Hadrien: Not likely we overlap with the group meeting
… Maybe TF overlaps? But we should probably avoid that

ivan: I would like the TF leaders to avoid overlap with the main meeting

<LaurentLM> +1 to Ivan

ivan: on the other hand, having two TF overlap can happen
… If that is a real possibility we should have more zooms

CharlesL: Last week we had csun, I presented guidelines, Amazon was there and they will use it in their store

AvneeshSingh: This work has been done in the CG if people want to follow along

ivan: Any chance to get Amazon in this group?

<gpellegrino> Post referenced by Charles: https://www.fondazionelia.org/en/whats-new/amazon-kindle-will-ingest-accessibility-metadata-following-the-onix-3-1-standards/

<CharlesL> here is that link for the viewer

<CharlesL> DAISY Accessibility Metadata Viewer

<CharlesL> https://daisy.github.io/a11y-meta-viewer/

<CharlesL> Accessibility Metadata Display Guide for Digital Publications 2.0 https://w3c.github.io/publ-a11y/a11y-meta-display-guide/2.0/guidelines/

Minutes manually created (not a transcript), formatted by scribe.perl version 244 (Thu Feb 27 01:23:09 2025 UTC).