W3C

Publishing Maintenance Working Group Telco

12 February 2026

Attendees

Present
Avneesh Singh, Charles LaPierre, Dale Rogers, Brady Duga, George Kerscher, georgek, Grigorily Manucharian, Hadrien Gardeur, Ivan Herman, Daniel Kimberg, Laurent Le Meur, Masakazu Kitahara, Matt Garrish, Murata Makoto, Romain Deltour, Shinya Takami, Susan Neuhaus, Toshiaki Koike, Wendy Reid
Regrets
-
Chair
Wendy Reid
Scribe
Susan Neuhaus

Meeting minutes

Annotations

<Wendy Reid> w3c/epub-specs#2912

Wendy Reid: and if everyone is good with that, then we can move on to talking about the first public working draft

Ivan Herman: I'm picking up this PR for Laurent Le Meur who is on vacation. This PR makes the old one obsolete
… I recorded the list of selectors we agreed on two weeks ago
… there are two issues for discussion
… we discussed one last time, how to handle the text fragment
… we didn't agree on how to do that
… so I added two approaches, it would be best to remove one of them
… I removed some of the selectors from our table, and added text fragment selector
… it has two downsides, it is not yet a standard, and we don't know when it will be
… we don't know if the syntax will stay on or if it will change
… causing issues
… if it is a URL it has to be encoded, which would make the text fragment pretty much unreadable
… we have a quote selector in the original text
… I added that with a note that it is up to the implementers to decide if they want to use it and how
… there are two advantages to leaving this to the implementers
… the person quoting can set the quote
… and we don't have to worry about the syntax change
… but we are pushing this into the reading system's court
… the second problem: we discussed the text position selector
… which counts characters and selects the text between two integers.
… how do we do this in HTML
… the text position selector was intended for pure text files
… there is normative text that would work and is applied to a different selector and doesn't apply here
… all other things are editorial and don't need discussion

Laurent Le Meur Le Meur: The text must be selected before using the text position selector
… when I read the two sections, quote selector, and text position selector
… there is a conditional approach, if you have to work with copyrighted protected contents, use the text position selector, otherwise use the quote selector

Ivan Herman: I understand now, my comments are withdrawn

Brady Duga: the normalization is ugly, but its OK, because that's what the original text says
… but its not clear where the text stream starts
… where do I get the position for the overall text

Laurent Le Meur Le Meur: I agree that we should specify the text origin

Brady Duga: perhaps it is the inner text of the closest element that we are talikng about, if it there isn't one then it is body.

Hadrien Gardeur: I don't want to do the second option, I don't want to have to process all of the text before I start
… the risk of the syntax changing for text fragment isn't very big
… it is widely used, and the people working on this know that

wendreid: where does this leave us?

Ivan Herman: we have a three way answer for this
… 1. we keep it as it is in the PR

<Ivan Herman> 1. We keep text fragments in both places

<Ivan Herman> 2. remove it from the fragment selector

Laurent Le Meur: In both cases you have the string you want to use

<Ivan Herman> 3. we remove it from the text quote selector

Laurent Le Meur Le Meur: with the text fragment selector you can keep just the begining and the end
… the choice we've got is not between different models, it is
… between a syntax that is within the specification but not widely known
… and with one that is widely known but not part of the specifcation

Brady Duga: I think we should choose one, and keep in mind we might need to switch

Ivan Herman: I almost agree with Brady, it is safer to keep the text quote selector
… we push the specification out of the problem

Brady Duga: as long as we pick one I'm happy

Ivan Herman: the annotation standard we develop is for exchanging annotations between systems
… it is not about the styling, and the text quote selector will be much more readable

Brady Duga: the text fragment selector is probably better defined
… having a well defined algorithm is important, but that is a guess

Laurent Le Meur Le Meur: I agree with Brady, the text fragment selector seems well written
… but the quote selector is not
… in the text fragment selector you can leave the middle unsaid

Brady Duga: that is a huge difference when we talk about copyright.
… some systems use precentage of the book for copyright
… with the fragment selector, we wouldn't be using up so much of the text

Ivan Herman: readability is not an option in the HTML spec

Ivan Herman: I change my vote, and propose we remove the quote selector from our spec

Laurent Le Meur Le Meur: at the time we want to close the recommendation if there is not standard, should we plan now for what we will do?

GeorgeK: publishers in education use both EPUB reading systems and HTML reading systems. Using quote selector would bridge those systems

Hadrien Gardeur: I think we shouldn't publish this if the syntax isn't final. I think it is fine to wait a bit more, there is no reason to rush

Ivan Herman: I'm not sure I understand what Hardrien said

Hadrien Gardeur: I am responding to Laurent Le Meur Le Meur's question

Ivan Herman: we can make a note in the spec now about the possible fallback
… today we should try to publish a spec that is as close as we can to what we want for its final form

Laurent Le Meur Le Meur: if the text fragment syntax isn't finalized, I think we should still publish at the end of the year

Hadrien Gardeur: but it doesn't need to be normative

Wendy Reid: we could leave the annotation spec in the same state as the text fragment spec, as a working group note

Brady Duga: when should we worry about this? we should wait until it was an issue
… rather than solving all possible outcomes
… I think it is too early to worry about it

Ivan Herman: we should move on publishing to the first working draft
… we get the horizontal reviews
… at some point we can say that we suspend the work because we are waiting on a dependent spec
… for the time being we should move ahead believing that the syntax will be resolved

Wendy Reid: our next step is to decide we can announce this as a first draft
… we can still make changes
… this is a good time to publish the first draft and invite feedback
… is there any opposition to publishing this?

Ivan Herman: I don't oppose this. There are two more documents that we may want to publish at some point
… 1. the use case document
… we might want to publish this at the same time

<Ivan Herman> vocab

Ivan Herman: the other one is
… I have been developing the vocabulary in parallel
… it might be good to publish this together because the annotation has references to it
… and to make the links live properly, we would need to have the vocabulary document live

Wendy Reid: is the vocabulary a note?
… we have to publish this as a working draft, and develop a short name

Laurent Le Meur Le Meur: is the a problem with "ann"

Brady Duga: it looks alot like "announcements"

Laurent Le Meur Le Meur: "annot"? is less confusing?

Ivan Herman: i would go with epub-anno

Wendy Reid: that would be consistent with our pattern

Ivan Herman: there is one more question, do we want to add a version number?
… if so, 1.0 or 3.4?

Laurent Le Meur Le Meur: I would go with 3.4 since it is related to EPUB 3.4

Ivan Herman: the version number would go in the title

Shinya Takami: since the accessibility is 1.2, 1.0 is good

magarrish: if this is revision bound with 3.4 then I have no problem with it

<Avneesh Singh> EPUB accessibility is independent of EPUB 3 version.

Laurent Le Meur Le Meur: if we don't modify epub, why would we push annotations changes

<Shinya Takami> +1 to Brady Duga

Brady Duga: it seems like 1.0 makes more sense, then we can update annotations without updating EPUB specs

<Wendy Reid> Proposed: Publish EPUB Annotations 1.0 as a FPWD, with the shortname epub-anno

<Shinya Takami> +1

<Charles LaPierre> +1

<Ivan Herman> +1

<Wendy Reid> +1

<Dale Rogers> +1

<Brady Duga> +1

<Matt Garrish> +1

<Hadrien Gardeur> +1

<Laurent Le Meur Le Meur> +1

<Toshiaki Koike> +1

<Susan Neuhaus> +1

<Grigorily Manucharian> +1

<Romain Deltour> +1

<Avneesh Singh> +1

<Masakazu Kitahara> +1

RESOLUTION: Publish EPUB Annotations 1.0 as a FPWD, with the shortname epub-anno

<GeorgeK> +1

<Wendy Reid> Proposed: Publish the EPUB Annotations Vocabulary as a draft note, with the shortname epub-anno-vocab

<GeorgeK> +1

<Wendy Reid> +1

<Susan Neuhaus> +1

<Charles LaPierre> +1

<Matt Garrish> +1

<Shinya Takami> +1

<Ivan Herman> +1

<Brady Duga> +1

<Dale Rogers> +1

<Toshiaki Koike> +1

<Grigorily Manucharian> +1

<Hadrien Gardeur> +1

<Avneesh Singh> +1

<Laurent Le Meur Le Meur> +1

<Masakazu Kitahara> +1

<Romain Deltour> +1

RESOLUTION: Publish the EPUB Annotations Vocabulary as a draft note, with the shortname epub-anno-vocab

Ivan Herman: is the use UCR ready to publish?

Laurent Le Meur Le Meur: yes it is stable

<Wendy Reid> Proposed: Publish the EPUB Annotations Use Cases document as a working group note, with the shortname epub-anno-ucr

<Shinya Takami> +1

<Matt Garrish> +1

<Wendy Reid> +1

<Ivan Herman> +1

<Laurent Le Meur Le Meur> +1

<Charles LaPierre> +1

<Toshiaki Koike> +1

<Grigorily Manucharian> +1

<Brady Duga> +1

<Romain Deltour> +1

<Susan Neuhaus> +1

<Dale Rogers> +1

<Masakazu Kitahara> +1

<GeorgeK> +1

<Hadrien Gardeur> +1

<Avneesh Singh> +1

RESOLUTION: Publish the EPUB Annotations Use Cases document as a working group note, with the shortname epub-anno-ucr

Multi-granularity highlighting in media overlays

<Wendy Reid> w3c/epub-specs#2917

Hadrien Gardeur: a number of specialized libraries are moving away from Daisy
… they are using media overlays with human or computer audio
… they are using tools that can generate a media overlay with open source voices
… audiobook publishers are interested in this technology too
… usually we just talk about media overlays in kids books

but there is a wider use
… the technologies are using different levels of highlighting and aligning
… you may want to choose the level of alignment
… it wouldn't take very much to do this
… we would need additional roles in epub type that identify structures
… I use "utterance"
… thanks to the use of seq plus [?] plus epub type it would be easy to do
… it would be a non normative change in that it only adds vocabulary
… and would be backward compaitible
… for reading systems that are aware of this, it could allow users to make a choice between word by word or other anchoring
… we would probably see tools and reading systems capable of this in the short term
… this will add value, is compatible with existing implementations, and we have commitments for reading system support and production

Wendy Reid: I've seen this. I am concern about the nesting required
… is that feasible in a media overlay file?
… the other concern is does this need to be a production concern?
… can reading systems detect this? Can they identify a part of a document as a paragraph, say?
… a third concern is internationalization, since not all languages have the same word boundaries as, say, English

Hadrien Gardeur: about production: many files already wrap words and containers for utterance
… what is missing is the role in SMIL
… it is completely automatable
… the second question: it would be challenging to do this on the reading system side
… for instance tts is not always acurate

Hadrien Gardeur: we don't need to worry about internationalization if we use something like utterance which is pretty open

Ivan Herman: a formal question: you are asking for new values for the role

<Shinya Takami> shiestyle: let's continue this topic next week

Shinya Takami: we are out of time, we can continue this discussion

Summary of resolutions

  1. Publish EPUB Annotations 1.0 as a FPWD, with the shortname epub-anno
  2. Publish the EPUB Annotations Vocabulary as a draft note, with the shortname epub-anno-vocab
  3. Publish the EPUB Annotations Use Cases document as a working group note, with the shortname epub-anno-ucr
Minutes manually created (not a transcript), formatted by scribe.perl version 248 (Mon Oct 27 20:04:16 2025 UTC).