Publishing Business Group Telco — Minutes

Date: 2018-10-09

See also the Agenda and the IRC Log

Attendees

Present: Ivan Herman, Wolfgang Schindler, Ralph Swick, Avneesh Singh, Murata Makoto, Tzviya Siegman, Karen Myers, Dave Cramer, RalphS, Ric Wright, Jeff Jaffe, Liisa McCloy-Kelley, Bill Kasdorf, Dan Sanicola, George Kerscher, Mateus Teixeira, Julian Calderazi

Regrets: Brian O’Leary, Luc Audrain, Jens Klingelhöfer, Junko Kamata

Guests:

Chair: Liisa McCloy-Kelley

Scribe(s): Ric Wright

Content:

Murata Makoto: Me too.

Tzviya Siegman: i just started the meeting

1. CG’s EPUB3.2

Dave Cramer: Community group has officially approved the spec and is requesting the business group to approve.
… 3.2 is backwards compatible, has been reformatted to be clearer
… updated the conformation to external specs, such as SVG, etc.
… so users of 3.0.1 shouldn’t have to change their workflows.
… How do we present this to the world? EPUBCheck needs to be updated, for example.
… So we would prefer to reserve the announcement until all our ducks are in a row?

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: Does the BG need to use a particular process?

Murata Makoto: We published 3.0.1, but was ignored by Apple. Do we know that reading systems will support it? I do not want to repeat the same experience. I might be overworried. But we had a bad experience.

Bill Kasdorf: What is being asked is approval but not necessarily action outside the group?

Dave Cramer: We did have active participation from some of the RS (e.g. Microsoft and Google) so it is not obvious why RS WOULDN’T support it

Murata Makoto: Sounds great to me.

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: If we, the BG, bless the proposed spec and then reach out to the RS to get their support.

Ivan Herman: This makes sense, but why, for example, did Apple did not support 3.0.1?

Dave Cramer: https://github.com/w3c/publ-epub-revision/issues/974

Murata Makoto: But apple refused to support the reserved prefixes (see issue above)

Ric Wright: +1 tzviya

George Kerscher: I agree with the recommendation and if we were a real WG, what would be our next step? Validation that at least two RS support 3.2

Dave Cramer: EPUB’s status has been complicated by the merger. There is a lot of value in a rigorously qualified spec.

Murata Makoto: I’m not requesting a test suite.

Dave Cramer: But we are NOT a WG and in the W3C this is not the purview of the CG

Tzviya Siegman: Testing is a good idea but there is some concern about one specific vendor, i.e. Apple Have we talked to them?

Dave Cramer: These are not great big problems in the grand scheme of things.
… It would be good to get Apple’s view on these things but…

Tzviya Siegman: Agreed. This is valuable but not essential.

Murata Makoto: So when do we publish and get testimonials?

Dave Cramer: We publish THEN get testimonials

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: I believe we should wait until it is a bit more

Ric Wright: I am the only reading system vendor on this call is, what is exactly what you are asking from us. Without a test suite it is difficult to prove that we are conforming to the spec

Dave Cramer: We need to exercise the differences between 3.0.1 and 3.2

Ric Wright: i have a quick question, I agree with dave, but is there a formal document that goes and lists the differences?
… ie, is there a formal doc for the differences between 3.0.1 and 3.2?

Dave Cramer: https://w3c.github.io/publ-epub-revision/epub32/spec/epub-changes.html

Avneesh Singh: charter says 5 days email vote

Dave Cramer: yes, I will supply link

Dave Cramer: So we need to set up a formal 5-day vote

Bill Kasdorf: What is the process? simple majority?

Ralph Swick: It is a call consensus

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: So we should start an email process to drive this?

Dave Cramer: Is it correct that the BG is waiting for the RS to weigh in? Or what?

Ivan Herman: I think it is fine if we do these actions in parallel, i.e. we ask the RS to give their opinion, but at the same time the BG can continue with their processes

Avneesh Singh: Would 5 days be enough for RS?

Ric Wright: +1 to ivan and avneesh

Julian Calderazi: +1 for 2 weeks

Murata Makoto: +1

Bill Kasdorf: +1 to two weeks

Ivan Herman: How about 2 weeks for the RS to give feedback

Julian Calderazi: Just wondering. Can we expect this window of time to be enough for RS?

Ric Wright: When would the bell sound on this two weeks?

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: How about we start at the end of this week, i.e Friday 12 October?

Murata Makoto: +1

Julian Calderazi: deadline on 26th right?

Ivan Herman: +1

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: Yes, that would be good.

George Kerscher: Do we also want to ask for testimonials ?

Dave Cramer: Is the timeline the same for testimonials?

George Kerscher: Question of nomenclature. We have been using “EPUB 3” but do we need to be more explicit in our discussions, etc?

2. epubcheck

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: We will always accept testimonials.

Tzviya Siegman: EPUBCheck work has begun. DAISY is starting to look at the code base. Luc and Tzviya will set up a regular meeting with DAISY to track the work
… Logistical work will begin soon (moving repos from IDPF to W3C, for example)

Tzviya Siegman: https://www.w3.org/blog/2018/10/epubcheck-fundraising/

Tzviya Siegman: alpha of the EPUB 3.2 support should be ready in November, with final release circa March 2019
… Still looking for funding!

Avneesh Singh: Time line is as follows:

3. joint bg and wg meeting at TPAC

Tzviya Siegman: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Mt9PTcOdmrCwIsgfxbGMGjwHlUsySU01I0D4oBkSbcA/edit?usp=sharing

Ivan Herman: As WG member, I would like to know is what we do at the WG of interest to the various participants in the BG?
… It would be very good if this point could be addressed at our discussions at TPAC

Tzviya Siegman: +1 to ivan_

Jeff Jaffe: Dave mentioned that EPUB status has been complicated by the merger. If so, it would be a worthwhile discussion at TPAC to explore what it means to be “complicated”.

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: Agreed. This also relates to George’s point about nomenclature.

Dave Cramer: Agreed, good topic for TPAC but it also raises the larger issue of how does EPUB fit into the W3C and web-publishing.
… Many meaty questions there that are worth discussing

Tzviya Siegman: In planning for TPAC, we have explicitly tried to cover this in the agenda
… So hopefully we will be able to come up with a cohesive vision.

Jeff Jaffe: Agreed that these are the right questions and discussion to have.

Dave Cramer: I will volunteer to try and drive this as Tzviya is pretty busy at TPAC

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: How do we we ensure that we are building the right tools and processes?

Karen Myers: +1 Liisa’s comments

Jeff Jaffe: We are looking for a new champion to drive this general area. We have interviewed two people, who then decided it is not for them, i.e., we are still looking for our champion.

4. conference collection

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: We have started work on this set of information for people on the BG

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1W_WWvwV93Cwx_hFTmeDQ2bBFW_Qn1j2duVJT1e3Wxfc/edit#gid=0

5. math and ebooks

Dave Cramer: There has been a fair amount of work on this topic, notably by Benetech
… It seems like the direction we are heading is that there are multiple specialized markups that need to be implemented

Dave Cramer: One approach is to use some form of polyfills using SVG, but there isn’t a lot of interest in doing so.
… It may be that there is NOT one single, all-encompassing solution
… We need someone who is willing to track this.

Tzviya Siegman: This problem is not unique to EPUB. We need to recognize this and broaden our view

Ralph Swick: +1 to “we need to solve this for the Web”

Murata Makoto: +1

Dave Cramer: The test book: http://epubtest.org/epubs/epub30-test-0330-20180905.epub

George Kerscher: Support what Tzviya said. We do have a test book for Math that allows one to pass the MathML to an assistive technology
… It is not a complete solution but is a start.
… A solution based on SVG that transforms from MathML to SVG to allow accessibility would be great, but it doesn’t currently exist.

Julian Calderazi: We have to keep in mind we will need to take this as a serious issue as regards to ‘EPUB for education’

Ivan Herman: MathML is only one of dialects that we need to be aware. And it is unreasonable to expect the browsers to do this.
… Alternatively, we end up relying on these “ML-polyfills” so it is incumbent on this group to work with those groups and help them improve their support
… Where the W3C could help would be to help guide these polyfiller groups understand the problem space and how to solve it.

Ric Wright: +1 to ivan

Julian Calderazi: +1 to Ivan too

George Kerscher: There is some SVG work that has been ongoing in this area.

Ric Wright: Is there a link to the SVG work?

Tzviya Siegman: https://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/WG/wiki/Main_Page

6. ISO related issues

Avneesh Singh: In the ISO task force call that happened yesterday, does someone want to share that information with this group
… One of the concerns of the ISO group is that they are not clear on how it relates to W3C efforts?
… Also some concern about how some of these conflicts and how they get resolved. Plus, what is the timeline for these efforts?