Meeting minutes
the issue opened for structural semantics
<Shinya Takami> w3c/
Hadrien Gardeur: In the case of publication containing more than one episode. That could be volumes or seasons. Usually one epub is one episode, but in some case there is interest to package more han one episode at a time. It makes sense to have a vocabulary to descirbe this. It's a way to allow RS to provide affordances and crafted reading experiences. Globally, it is about providing semantics instead of layout rendering controls. With the semantics,the RS can provide control to the user.
Shinya Takami: I understand the situation and use case, but i think it is difficult to do on the author side. I think metadata is another option to provide power to the user.
Charles LaPierre: I'm concerned about using `epub-type`, I would prefer DPUB-Aria, and we have fast track to get things in DPUB-Aria now. I also agree there is an important piece of metadata to add to say how many episodes.
<Shinya Takami> +1 to Charles to use DPUB-Aria than epub-type
Hadrien Gardeur: I agree I would prefer DPUB-Aria if we have ways to push things there, because they are not actually sufficient. epub-type seems quicker to get.
… metadata is complementary, I think. It allows to say how many chapter, it does not indicates where the chapter start.
Dale Rogers: I'm always in favor of semantics.
<Charles LaPierre> +1 to both metadata and semantics
Shinya Takami: maybe episode and issue is the same, do we really need three words? It may be too much information for a RS and not much value for the user. To me the metadata outisde of the epub is more important.
Hadrien Gardeur: it's no cost to have variety, and it can be used to push specific information to different user agents, like screen readers per example.
Dale Rogers: from a practical point of view, I'll be interested to see how RS handle differently each. I see a top level TOC but that could probably be different.
Hadrien Gardeur: It could be separated TOC, it will affect the progression, I have several use cases.
Hadrien Gardeur: this vocabulary is to be added to the nav doc, not to the content.
Charles LaPierre: I see the use case of a screen reader hotkey to shift to the next episode.
Images in spine
Hadrien Gardeur: manga production today is mostly made of images wrapped in HTML because the spec imposes HTML as spine elements.
… The reality is that the HTML wrapper is ignored as soon as possible by distributors or RS.
… That's a problem for accessibility. We still can provide images in spine with HTML fallback or provide HTML in spine with images as fallback.
… But we need guidance.
Shinya Takami: anyway we have to prepare HTML for accessibility.
Charles LaPierre: SVG image are possibly accessible without HTML. That's one way to do it also. I've seen fixed layout ebooks with SVG and CSS. That's an option to allow because it exist.
Hadrien Gardeur: being pragmatic, SVG is not used for comics to my knowledge. Most RS have a specific mode for comics, they just display images and badly support SVG. In the comic world everything is bitmap.
Hadrien Gardeur: I see comic accessibility with something like SMILE, ways to syncronise images with text and audio. The current HTML practice is a big alt text replacement, lacking of granularity.
Shinya Takami: I agree we have to separate comics and manga from fixed layout. It is different. Today, making comics fully accessible is very costly.
Dale Rogers: it's the same discussion about publisher intent in a way. We need good best practice.
Hadrien Gardeur: for comics, EPUB is a distribution container, but it not used by the RS. The RS in comic mode keeps images, metadata and TOC. It's about easing the way for them, so they use the standard instead of homegrown recipes.
Hadrien Gardeur: Allowing images in spine is what the comic industry wants but it needs a spec change and has the risk of breaking in RS. Also, it is hard to scope it only to comics.
Hadrien Gardeur: using HTML as fallback is not supported by Apple.
Hadrien Gardeur: pragmaticaly, continue using HTML and provide images as fallback is probably the easier to implement and less risky. It still mean to produce useless HTML, but probably this one is autogenerated and don't come with extra costs.
Charles LaPierre: also allowing images in spine might be a problem with our charter.
Dale Rogers: the beautifull thing with standards is that tere are so many of them.
<Shinya Takami> Hadrien Gardeur: We will skip TF calls in August and focus on preparing PR for scrolled comics. See you in September!