W3C

Publishing Maintenance Working Group

18 December 2025

Attendees

Present
Charles LaPierre, Dale Rogers, Brady Duga, Elizabeth Kraler, Gautier Chomel, GeorgeK, Hadrien Gardeur, Ivan Herman, Daniel Kimberg, Laurent Le Meur, Grigorily Manucharian, Masakazu Kitahara, Matt Garrish, Romain Deltour, Shinya Takami, Susan Neuhaus, Toshiaki Koike, Wendy Reid
Regrets
Avneesh Singh, Gregorio Pellegrino
Chair
Wendy Reid
Scribe
Susan Neuhaus

Meeting minutes

align-x-center - w3c/epub-specs#2847

Wendy Reid: we want to talk about whether this is only for fixed layout

Brady Duga: literally everyone wants to obsolete this, can we take a resolution?

Matt Garrish: I’ve heard two options, deprecating it or outdate it?

Shinya Takami: I think property is regressive from Japan many years ago

only a few reading systems support it, publishers rarely use it
… I propose to move to either status

Ivan Herman: the question is will any book that has this property be flagged with an error?

Shinya Takami: I think this feature is rarely used, so it is OK to throw an error
… deprecated is fine

Toshiaki Koike, tanslated by shiestyle to English from Japanese
… this property was proposed by Koike-san and Ishii-san many years ago
… it is not a problem if this is deprecated

Wendy Reid: I wonder if this will result in a flood of errors for legacy books

Ivan Herman: it seems this is not a problem

<Wendy Reid> PROPOSED: Deprecate 'align-x-center' in EPUB 3.4.

<Ivan Herman> +1

<Toshiaki Koike> +1

<Brady Duga> +1

<Susan Neuhaus> +1

<Shinya Takami> +1

<Matt Garrish> +1

<Masakazu Kitahara> +1

<Wendy Reid> +1

<Romain Deltour> +1

<GeorgeK> +1

<Laurent Le Meur> +1

<Charles LaPierre> +1

<Dale Rogers> +1

<Hadrien Gardeur> +1

<Gautier Chomel> +1

RESOLUTION: Deprecate 'align-x-center' in EPUB 3.4.

introductionn of grigoriy

Wendy Reid: I would like to invite [grigoriy] to introduce himself

Grigorily Manucharian: I was invited by Gautier as a representative of French publishing
… my specialty is educational texts and converting them to Ebooks

Reorganized layout section - w3c/epub-specs#2844

Ivan Herman: there are over 100 comments

Matt Garrish: We were looking at the initial start page, what should happen when there is no spread placement on the first spine item
… we decided we should display it centered in the viewscreen or slotting the page on its own however that best works
… we have a note to make an equivalent in rolled layouts

Hadrien Gardeur: There was a discussion also about the first resource when there isn’t spread information
… there was a discussion with Roman about other things

Matt Garrish: The issue with Roman was whether this should be a MUST
… this removes a normative requirement that was untestable
… I think this works in this case because this is an authoring suggestion
… it would be good to move forward since we have a lot of issues in the PR

Ivan Herman: it should be merged as soon as possible

<Grigorily Manucharian> Hadrien my nickname is the first letter of my first name and 3 first letters of my last name, which makes a half-life reference, how blessed can one be :)

Ivan Herman: we said we would add a not whereby it is possible to make this in an FXL

Matt Garrish: it is in the discussion about fixed-layout documents
… and in the icb section it says if you are using these, then the reading system will pick it up

Ivan Herman: this should be merged as soon as possible followed by a revamping of the test cases in the new year

Brady Duga: we should submit this asap, there are 100 comments on the PR
… many of them have nothing to do with reorganization
… I don’t think this is a good workflow, we are doing real, unrelated editing in this PR
… if you see something in a PR that isn’t related to the PR, they should open a separate issue
… and I suggest mgarrish pushback on this
… obviously somethings would be easier to do at the same time,
… but we’ve made so many normative changes in this PR I don’t think I’ve responded to them all
… but mgarrish should ask others to open the PR, not be responsible for that himself

Matt Garrish: I agree this one got out of control

Wendy Reid: noted for the future, don’t make mgarrish do so many things in one PR
… I think we are all agreed to merge this as soon as possilbe

<Wendy Reid> PROPOSED: Merge PR #2844

<Matt Garrish> +1

<Wendy Reid> +1

<Ivan Herman> +1

<Romain Deltour> +1

<Toshiaki Koike> +1

<Shinya Takami> +1

<Hadrien Gardeur> +1

<Charles LaPierre> +1

<Gautier Chomel> +1

<Masakazu Kitahara> +1

Shinya Takami: thank you mgarrish for including a note for Japanese rolled comics

<Susan Neuhaus> +1

RESOLUTION: Merge PR #2844

<Brady Duga> +1

Wendy Reid: the big task now will be the tests that need to be edited and renamed

Ivan Herman: I have created a test file with images in the spine

Hadrien Gardeur: thank you ivan for the example of images in the spine, I will create a few more
… these will be used by engineers in Thorium to test presentation
… we expect implementation on IOS and Readium Mobile

AOB

Ivan Herman: I was looking at the charter, and the only outstanding standardization issue is annotations
… we know that is going on. I have the impression that more small issues are going on
… so the next step would be to go to the candidate step
… that would begin the horizontal reviews.
… we should organize ourselves to do these over the winter
… we need some volunteers to take parts of the spec to the relevant group

Hadrien Gardeur: on the comics side we have talked about thngs like group notes
… I still have an issue with the structural semantics
… I don’t think these would block going forward

Ivan Herman: I was focusing on the normative parts
… the main question is who will do the horizontal reviews?

Wendy Reid: we have to do horizontal reviews for security, privacy, internationalization, accessibility, TAG

Ivan Herman: there are forms we need to fill out
… most of the time these reviews don’t result in changes
… it would be worth telling people what changes were made
… maybe with a small wiki
… we didn’t do an enormous amount of normative changes
… we deprecated a few things
… we could mention looking into html and deciding not to make that change

Wendy Reid: we will need to add to the change log

Ivan Herman: perhaps we should filter it out, some of those changes are editorial

Matt Garrish: we could filter the change log, and try to organize them by security, privacy, etc

Ivan Herman: my guess is that we didn’t make may changes that require review

Ivan Herman: maybe web assembly will bring up security issue

Dale

Dale Rogers: is there a resource for learning more about horizontal reviews?

<Wendy Reid> https://www.w3.org/guide/documentreview/#how-to-get-horizontal-review

Matt Garrish: basically there are experts within W3C who will look at what you’ve done to see if there are issues that come up
… adding more checks and balances

Wendy Reid: they are experts in security or privacy, not necessarily in EPUB
… the last time we did this we learned a lot

Charles LaPierre: in accessibility we added in the date of the review

Wendy Reid: I think this should be pretty straightforward since we’ve done this recently
… think about how we will do this over the holidays

<Dale Rogers> Sue: Last name is spelled Rogers. So the minutes pick it up.

Wendy Reid: we are just looking for someone to own the process, you don’t have be an expert in the particular specialty

<Charles LaPierre> S/DaleRodgers/Dale Rogers

GeorgeK1: I imagine the accessibility task force will manage the accessibility review

Brady Duga: how does the new annotation spec figure into this?
… it might have significant safety and privacy issues

Ivan Herman: we agreed that we would move to a recommendation for annotation specs
… we will eventually need to have that reviewed as welll
… for now let’s set that aside. But that is different than the others
… as soon as there is a public working draft, we should reach out to the others
… it has to happen separately from the authoring spec and reading system
… the annotations will a big horizontal review

Brady Duga: if someone volunteers for something, are they volunteering for the easy stuff or the annotations?

Laurent Le Meur: Ivan Herman, what happens when we talk about internationalization, etc when we talk about annotations?

Ivan Herman: in 3.3, we focused on things that are only EPUB specific

Wendy Reid: are there any other topics to bring up before we wrap up for the year?
… our next meeting is January 8. I hope everyone has a lovely holiday season.
… see you in the new year

Summary of resolutions

  1. Deprecate 'align-x-center' in EPUB 3.4.
  2. Merge PR #2844
Minutes manually created (not a transcript), formatted by scribe.perl version 244 (Thu Feb 27 01:23:09 2025 UTC).