W3C

Publishing Maintenance Working Group Telco

18 June 2026

Attendees

Present
Amanda Lee, Avneesh Singh, Charles LaPierre, Dale Rogers, Ivan Herman, Matt Garrish, Toshiaki Koike, Wendy Reid
Regrets
Gautier Chomel, Shinya Takami, Susan Neuhaus
Chair
Wendy Reid
Scribe
Wendy Reid

Meeting minutes

Watermarking in EPUB - w3c/epub-specs#3021

Ivan Herman: We got this as a comment from the Privacy Review, it comes from them but they made it clear it's not a blocker for the horizontal review.
… essentially the question is do we address the issue of watermarking in the privacy section of the document
… I haven't looked, can we add anything?
… we discussed this in the chair's call and it does come close to DRM so we usually avoid it

Matt Garrish: Was going to say the same, we could tie it up with DRM itself and leave the section alone to just what we already have for DRM, just add watermarking, I started drafting something
… addition of one sentence to add watermarking

<Charles LaPierre> +1 to Matt's suggestion, just add Watermarking & DRM.

Matt Garrish: it's close to DRM and can be applied to an EPUB but isn't part of the spec itself
… nothing we need to do in the standard itself, we know people do it, but that's as far as we should go

Ivan Herman: I agree, but for the sake of discussion, from a privacy view, DRM and watermarking are different, watermarking automatically takes a piece of information and makes it visible
… DRM is in the background and obfuscated, to Nick's question, they are different

Charles LaPierre: Benetech and Bookshare uses watermarking on the EPUBs, there's two kinds, one that uses the user's name or ID in the metadata, or attached to a boilerplate copyright notice added to the book
… the other type is hidden, it just adds spaces or different characters in the publication you wouldn't notice unless you had the algorithm to find them, and in that case it can be the person's name or ID
… public vs private watermarking
… wanted to point out these options

Matt Garrish: I was going to add, we don't say anything specific about DRM right now, all we say is it could reveal personal information about the reader, similar to what watermarking does based on Charles' comments
… you could get some of this information from the book metadata as well
… we can tack this on very easily, I can open the PR with what I have, and see if we think it makes sense

Ivan Herman: Let's do that

Wendy Reid: Good to note the PDF shared by Nick in the issue, we should follow practices

Matt Garrish: Agreed, the PDF does a good job of explaining it, better than we can, we reference it
… don't want to deal with it more than we have to, show some best practices

CR

Avneesh Singh: Update on accessibility horizontal review, Matthew himself is reviewing, he is hoping to complete it this week

<Avneesh Singh> w3c/a11y-request#164

Ivan Herman: If my memory is correct, what we don't have is the security response, if the a11y review is coming in a few days
… I met with Simone and raised the security review, explained what had changed, he sort of agreed, he said he would look at it
… still waiting on it
… my proposal would be once we have a11y sign off, we go to CR, essentially we start the CR transition process
… we'll need to have a resolution, can't do it today as we don't have enough people
… we have to pass a resolution, then we should start the process, time out for security
… we have the right to do it, we feel we've done what we had to do. We are not required to wait years to get a response
… my recommendation for the process
… to be clear, we're talking about EPUB 3.4 , EPUB RS 3.4, and EPUB A11y 1.2
… everyone is in agreement?

Charles LaPierre: No opposition, did we get i18n review?
… do we need a TAG review?

Ivan Herman: We got i18n approval and TAG didn't see a need to review since there wasn't big changes
… now that we have privacy and A11y soon, security is the only missing one

Matt Garrish: Did we have this problem last time?

Ivan Herman: We got a security review last time, a big one

Wendy Reid: It was one review last time, two this time

Matt Garrish: May be thinking of DPUB ARIA as well

Ivan Herman: There will be practical things for timing I'll work with Matt on, and a publication moratorium in July, once we have a resolution, Matt and I can work on this directly

Matt Garrish: We have the understanding document
… Understanding A11y 1.2, wanted to have it published at least as a draft note
… want to have it more official

Wendy Reid: I wouldn't want to ask people to vote on a doc they know nothing about

Matt Garrish: I'm just worried about the publishing moratorium
… is next week cutting it too close?

Ivan Herman: Moratorium starts July 3 until the 13th, and I'm on vacation most of that time
… if we pass a resolution today its doable, but I leave that to Wendy

Matt Garrish: Just a draft note, not a spec

Ivan Herman: Still a first public draft note

Matt Garrish: Don't want people to think we're going down rec track

Avneesh Singh: Should we send an email to do this instead? So people have a chance to review, but we need a URL and publication for it, we haven't had it in the agenda but we can give people time.

[admin things]

Ivan Herman: We'll need to close the PRs before going to CR

w3c/epub-specs#3026

Matt Garrish: We might want Nick's comment

Ivan Herman: CfC should be on a document with no upcoming changes

Matt Garrish: We've done approvals contingent on certain decisions
… we can mention it in the CR

Avneesh Singh: Do we need to do CR email today or on Monday/
… to Monday we will have time to do this and then we might have a11y review completion
… today we can do the draft note and the PR, then we can put the call out on monday for the CR

Ivan Herman: Just to avoid confusion, make them separate

<Matt Garrish> https://w3c.github.io/epub-specs/epub34/a11y-understand/

[more admin things]

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