W3C

Digital Comics TF

15 January 2026

Attendees

Present
Charles LaPierre, Dale Rogers, Brady Duga, Hadrien Gardeur, Masakazu Kitahara, Shinya Takami, Toshiaki Koike
Regrets
-
Chair
Hadrien Gardeur, Shinya Takami
Scribe
Brady Duga

Meeting minutes

Remaining non-normative work

Hadrien Gardeur: There have been some items we covered that were normative and are in the spec (e.g. role, etc)

<Hadrien Gardeur> w3c/epub-specs#2759

Hadrien Gardeur: we still have a non-normative item
… This doesn't really need the WG, we can do it
… Then there were some non-normative issues, like images in spine
… at tpac we said we might want some examples of that
… If we don't have any normative items left, what do we do?
… maybe put the TF on hold, and just do the non-normative work in the CG
… which might give us more people
… By moving this to the CG we might have more input, to get a better output
… This is very tempting
… we would only need to meet maybe once a month
… There are some admin issues like timing of the meeting
… so moving this to the CG sounds like a good idea

Shinya Takami: We are planning to stop this TF for now and move to CG. Are there any comments or opinions?

Hadrien Gardeur: Gautier, thoughts?

Shinya Takami: I spoke with Ivan, they can add a new calendar entry

Dale Rogers: I understand the idea of the move, my question is if ideas come out of the CG, do those go directly to the WG?

Hadrien Gardeur: For normative items, it could come to this TF, since we would just be paused
… but we haven't found anything that would apply

Dale Rogers: I will look into joining that, as I would like to keep participating

Shinya Takami: We have two options, move to CG, or we can move to the main call. It depends on the status of the proposal

Gautier Chomel: We are happy to house this at the CG
… this would be a TF of the CG

Hadrien Gardeur: That is what we wanted

Gautier Chomel: That is easy to do if we want to go this way
… I just have some minor things to do on the CG side

Charles LaPierre: I have no problem with the move
… What about SMIL and comics? Should we move that incubation to the CG?

Hadrien Gardeur: Anything related to incubation is great for the CG

Shinya Takami: 3.4 is basically closed, so if we do have normative changes, they may want to move to a later version

Charles LaPierre: We have already approached adding more if SMIL to epub
… so if it does get added we could look at writing best practices on how to write such comics at the cg

Hadrien Gardeur: Accessibility group is the most mature, since they have both normative and non-normative
… we should follow that

Shinya Takami: 3.4 is almost closed for normative changes, but we can add a WG note later

Dale Rogers: In the community, a big issue is implementation
… Hadrien Gardeur, you mentioned that there are already RSes experimenting with similar features
… will it be easy for them to switch to a SMIL version?

Hadrien Gardeur: For specialized libraries, they worked mainly with DAISY files
… But gradually they are moving to epub
… epub with MO is becoming their core format
… so there expectation for comics with pre-recorded audio is outside this since there was no format
… but since they are already betting on epub, there is a likelihood that if they can do this, they will

Hadrien Gardeur: ANother benefit to the CG is we won't be bound by time
… so we can continue to discuss comics issues even after the WG charter expires
… we have a gap that can be filled with best practices documents
… e.g. Japanese publishers have a best practices for Manga, it would be good to have a global best practices
… we can do that in the CG

Shinya Takami: That can be a CG or WG notes
… no objections?

Hadrien Gardeur: so we will cancel the meeting in the calendar, but we should send an email to the group to explain we aren't closing down
… we are just pausing

Shinya Takami: Let's talk schedule for the CG TF
… when should we meet next

Schedule for new TF in CG

Shinya Takami: when is better for you?
… after WG call is currently midnight

Hadrien Gardeur: Question for Americans - can we do it an hour before the call?
… I don't know where the American publishers are, NY?

Charles LaPierre: That's early

Dale Rogers: Yes, that is early for regular meetings

Hadrien Gardeur: We would probably only do once per month

Shinya Takami: Or wednesday as the same time slot as the WG call

Charles LaPierre: That could work

Dale Rogers: I agree

Brady Duga: Should we wait until this moves?

Hadrien Gardeur: Yeah, we should probably skip Feb, then we can see who else can join

Minutes manually created (not a transcript), formatted by scribe.perl version 248 (Mon Oct 27 20:04:16 2025 UTC).