W3C

Publishing Maintenance Working Group Telco

26 June 2025

Attendees

Present
Avneesh Singh, Charles LaPierre, Brady Duga, George Kerscher, Hadrien Gardeur, Ivan Herman, Laurent Le Meur, Masakazu Kitahara, Matt Garrish, Shinya Takami, Susan Neuhaus, Toshiaki Koike, Wendy Reid
Regrets
Gautier Chomel, Gregorio Pellegrino
Chair
Wendy Reid
Scribe
Susan Neuhaus

Meeting minutes

Wendy Reid: today we have some PRs that deserve attention

PR 2742 - w3c/epub-specs#2742

<Wendy Reid> https://pr-preview.s3.amazonaws.com/w3c/epub-specs/pull/2742.html

Wendy Reid: the first one is about reserved prefixes
… this fixes a related issue about reserved prefixes and obsoleting some that haven't been used

Matt Garrish: some of these links go to a 404
… what can we do to help people understand what these are now that there are not relevant
… we added a new column to the table with more explanation

Ivan Herman: how will we be handling this kind of thing?
… the vocabulary is a good example. We didn't take it out
… because of backward compatibility
… how long do we want to keep things like this in the specification?
… if we were not dedicated to backward compatibility we would probably remove things like this

Matt Garrish: I think it is kind of silly that we have to retain these things but we have to think of backward compatibility

Matt Garrish: if we take them out I would love to know who ever implemented these things

Charles LaPierre: does it make sense to delete the ones without a valid link

Matt Garrish: if you don't know about these identifiers, it is helpful to add a proper link that we can maintain

George Kerscher: Why don't we just get rid of it? If someone is using it then they can complain

Wendy Reid: that is compelling for the ones no longer maintained

Ivan Herman: the charter says that any 3.1 3.3 document should be backward compatible in 3.4
… then epubcheck might flag these terms as errors
… we will never know if anyone uses these

Matt Garrish: we can never be sure it is used

Brady Duga: alternatively could we say "this is a collection of deprecated prefixes"
… they still exist in the spec, just don't use them
… they are still in epub check and we just never remove them

Matt Garrish: then we need to decide if we flag all deprecated features

<Charles LaPierre> +1 to Brady's suggestion. and bring up a warning in EPUBCheck

Wendy Reid: it might not be bad if epub check flags deprecated prefixes

Brady Duga: if we really want links we can use internet archive or just let other people look there

Ivan Herman: let's keep it as we have it in the PR, but for our next charter, let ourselves delete some unused stuff

Brady Duga: that makes sense, can we track the things we would like to delete? So we can go back to it?

Ivan Herman: maybe the deprecated flag would be the best way to do that
… then we can add "everything will be retained except deprecated features" in the next charter

Matt Garrish: would that suggest we change the PR and put them in the deprecated section?

Ivan Herman: to be procedural, we should pass a resolution that deprecated features will be removed in our next charter

<Wendy Reid> Proposed: Deprecated features in EPUB 3.4 will be removed in future versions of the spec.

<Matt Garrish> +1

<Susan Neuhaus> +1

<Ivan Herman> +1

<Wendy Reid> +1

<Charles LaPierre> +1

<Brady Duga> +1

<Shinya Takami> +1

<Hadrien Gardeur> +1

<George Kerscher> +1

<Masakazu Kitahara> +1

<Toshiaki Koike> +1

RESOLUTION: Deprecated features in EPUB 3.4 will be removed in future versions of the spec.

Hadrien Gardeur: I have a somewhat long list of things I'd like to see deprecated
… what is the best course of action?
… I did a presentation on the misuse of some properties
… some of it comes from the work of the comics group

Ivan Herman: this would be good for the f2f

Wendy Reid: it would be good to open an issue so people can think about it ahead of time

Wendy Reid: matt will have to make some edits to that PR

PR 2735 - w3c/epub-specs#2735

Wendy Reid: the next is about ITS attributes

Ivan Herman: there is a set of attributes that look like the ARIA attributes defined by the W3C for internationalization
… like setting the translation of terms, setting aside language portions
… these attributes are not recognized in epub or an extension to HTML
… i ran into this problem changing a document into Chinese
… it was written with 3 different director sets
… epubcheck rejects this because it is not accepted

Matt Garrish: we were wondering if it would be easier to add extensions going forward

Matt Garrish: we would just add another extension section with optional reading system support

Wendy Reid: so we want to change this to an extension section?
… any opposition to merging this?

PR 2731 - w3c/epub-specs#2731

Wendy Reid: seeing none, we will move on

Wendy Reid: formulating the evaluation dates

Matt Garrish: we didn't formalize a format for the date
… the problem is how to localize the date when we don't know the format of the date
… we could choose an existing format, and likely exclude the time
… and will this affect existing content
… and have we already committed to bumping the conformance number
… if not, this affect all existing content that conforms to the current version
… are we proceeding on requiring access mode sufficient and is it OK to add this when we bump up the number?

Avneesh Singh: we will discuss this in an upcoming meeting in the WG
… we will elevate it to a must follow and see how the community responds
… we are moving ahead with precautions ACE will flag it
… I am worried if we make the date a must at this point, we would get downstream errors

Matt Garrish: maybe we keep a separate list of items that we would return to if we change conformance numbers

Hadrien Gardeur: I don't see the point of this change as a must statement
… what is the value of this change to the user? When you localize the date
… you can choose what to display. At best this could be a "should"
… especially since there are potential validation problems

Matt Garrish: I see what you're saying, but at this time we have no suggestion about how to express the date

Hadrien Gardeur: as long as it is based on an existing format, we can work with it

George Kerscher: identifying the date format seems like standards work
… if we change the conformance number, it gives us more freedom

Charles LaPierre: the reading system or bookstore can always display it how they choose
… having a standard format will help it be changed to the local language
… so we need to go with the ISO
… as far as requiring it, we can start requiring, it has been optional, but we tell everyone to put it in
… we can discuss this in our next WG call
… I agree with George that we should plan to update the conformance number

Matt Garrish: if we don't make it a requirement we will never really be sure what we get when processing this data
… if we made it a must we would know we could trust the required date format after a certain point
… we don't know what the date will contain if we don't do some testing

Avneesh Singh: does the backward compatibility clause get violated if we make these kinds of changes

Ivan Herman: the conformance in the charter never really explicitly refers to the accessibility metadata, we are in a gray area
… it refers to in practice what epub check checks

Charles LaPierre: similar to "conforms to" if you have that then you must put in "certified by"
… maybe it could be if you include a certified date it should conform to an ISO standard

Matt Garrish: that is what this change does

Wendy Reid: This change is OK, but we shouldn't make it a must?

Matt Garrish: right now we will accept any date format from the date section, make it a "should" and see what happens

Charles LaPierre: I don't know that we need to include the date/time, but its OK as long as the time is ISO standard

Hadrien Gardeur: One of the reasons we should be looser about the format is we don't know what people have in their systems
… if people use a timezone for instance, we can deal with that
… we shouldn't force things that aren't necessary

<Charles LaPierre> +1 to Hadrien Gardeur

Wendy Reid: any opposition to making this a "should" and adding date/time

Avneesh Singh: let's wait to merge this until after the Accessibility WG

<Charles LaPierre> I also agree this should be a MUST

Brady Duga: I prefer making it a must and updating the conformance number

Matt Garrish: if it isn't a must, ACE can bump it up as a serious error

Shinya Takami: This date is not mandatory, right?
… from a publisher's point of view we generate epub, and we have to change it because the date appeared, many publishers will use this, but this looks like tricky metadata

Matt Garrish: it isn't required, but it is a good record, for knowing when their accessibility was last done

Matt Garrish: the more important part is getting the accessibility review is done

Wendy Reid: if you're running ACE, you'll get an error, but not from EPUB check

Charles LaPierre: does ONIX have a similar field?

<Wendy Reid> https://ns.editeur.org/onix/en/196/91

Wendy Reid: it is number 91, latest accessibility assessment date
… so we'll let the Accessibility TF talk about this first, if they are happy, then we can merge it

PR 2730 - w3c/epub-specs#2730

<Ivan Herman> w3c/epub-specs#2714

Wendy Reid: adding pagebreak source to the metadata vocabulary property

Hadrien Gardeur: a general comment, how useful is this?
… in practice I don't see how we can use this if we get an identifier we don't know about
… we can't properly display it. It is hard to make use of this
… in ONIX it is pretty coming to know about the other format of a book
… in a EPUB context I'm not sure what to do with this

Charles LaPierre: this is useful when the end user is creating references to data
… it is more for citing passages by students or scholarly publishing

Wendy Reid: it doesn't have to be an ISBN, maybe we can be more specific and suggest a URL
… I see your point about this being difficult to display
… maybe this is also a question for the annotations group

Matt Garrish: the usefulness if for education purposes
… in terms of adding this to the spec. This is trying to address cases
… when a book has no print source
… this is an invitation to make our own standard and no rely on a dc:source
… we can continue working on improving it

Wendy Reid: is there any opposition to merging this as a step forward?
… alright, cool
… we don't have time for the last one

Matt Garrish: I'm holding off on this it is bound up in us bumping up the conformance version
… a question of making AccessModeSufficient a must and compatible with the current ISO version
… we may want to wait on this

Wendy Reid: I will put an "on hold" label on it

<Laurent Le Meur> move to #pm-ann

Summary of resolutions

  1. Deprecated features in EPUB 3.4 will be removed in future versions of the spec.
Minutes manually created (not a transcript), formatted by scribe.perl version 244 (Thu Feb 27 01:23:09 2025 UTC).