Publishing Steering Committee Telco — Minutes

Date: 2018-04-06

See also the Agenda and the IRC Log

Attendees

Present: Bill Kasdorf, Dave Cramer, Ivan Herman, Luc Audrain, George Kerscher, Liisa McCloy-Kelley, Daihei Shiohama, Garth Conboy

Regrets: Bill McCoy, Rick Johnson

Guests:

Chair: Luc Audrain

Scribe(s): Dave Cramer

Content:

Luc Audrain: regrets for next PBG meeting

1. Meeting timing

Garth Conboy: there’s some confusion on when these meetings happen

Luc Audrain: yes, I wanted to raise this point
… and having meetings for both euro and asia times
… we could do Asia time every three meetings
… others could be noon US

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: every fourth meeting–every two months we have an APAC-timed meeting

Garth Conboy: should we have a meeting at all due to LBF?

2. Next meeting agenda (and timing of the Asian meeting)

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: with LBF next week, and an ISO meeting already

Luc Audrain: ISO call is on Monday

Garth Conboy: we could do call on the 17th if we want

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: the cadence was to make the PBG meetings after the SC meetings
… so the question is should we go ahead even though attendance might be sparse

Luc Audrain: not sure if there will be conclusions from ISO discussion on Monday

Ivan Herman: I’m sure it won’t :)
… but on Monday we perhaps can outline the alternatives
… and the choice should be made by the larger group

Luc Audrain: the idea is that the meeting would result in action items for each option

Bill Kasdorf: the discussion should be via email with all the members, not just people who called in

George Kerscher: on Monday, I hope we eliminate some of the five options
… and we hope some options diverge further down the road
… 3.2 is needed no matter what
… so I think we can get further down the path

Luc Audrain: do we still set up a PBG meeting on Tuesday?

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: ???

Ivan Herman: I don’t want to postpone a meeting. it’s confusing.
… keep to the regular schedule

Garth Conboy: the coming meetings would be (list of dates)
… when do we want to do the first Asia-time meeting?
… April 10 would be Noon EDT

Luc Audrain: I would propose May 8 for the first APAC meeting

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: 7PM EDT

Garth Conboy: every 4th meeting is APAC time, right?
… I’ll work with the calendar and send invitations

Luc Audrain: I put dates in my 3/28 email
… I checked with Laurent; he said we can use the EDRLab conference line for the APAC-timed calls

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: for this meeting, the SC meeting, Bill and Rick have reported not having this on the calendar

Bill Kasdorf: it’s confusing because of my transitional state

Garth Conboy: this one should be in people’s calendars

Ivan Herman: it is in my calendar

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: anything to report on 3.2?

Garth Conboy: Matt is engaged, things are happening on Github

Dave Cramer: CG is having a call next Thursday

Luc Audrain: I’ve started to review PWG infoset for WP, and my first PR of my life :)

Ivan Herman: that discussion should be somewhere else

Luc Audrain: it should be an issue?

Ivan Herman: yes

Luc Audrain: I have other questions about the existing text, but I can make them issue
… s

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: we have report from ISO, we have a report on scheduling meetings, we have a 3.2 update
… what else should we talk about?

Bill Kasdorf: while the initiative sounded straightforward, it became a more daunting task. So only five people are signed up so far.

2.1. Workshop in Tokyo

Ivan Herman: Daihei, you had a discussion with BIllM about the workshop in Japan

Daihei Shiohama: there will be a meeting next week
… Bill M’s email issues and the responses, they will discuss that
… I have all the information, and I can share the outcome

Ivan Herman: this would be a good topic for the APAC-time call
… the workshop will be in Tokyo
… so it will be mostly people from East Asia

Daihei Shiohama: when is that call?

Ivan Herman: May 8
… by then, hopefully BillM will get this through W3M (W3C management)

Daihei Shiohama: My only concern is that it may conflict with holidays
… OK. We can discuss then, and I can share any updates I get before then

2.2. Reading system testing

George Kerscher: I posted an invitation for people to crowdsource testing of reading systems, and I can report on the fabulous response

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: yes please!
… who is responding?

George Kerscher: individuals, companys in the a11y field…
… a lot in the US and Canada, but also asia, australia, and europe
… I think I have 45 right now!

2.3. Epubcheck

Bill Kasdorf: what about epubcheck?

Ivan Herman: tzviya has been on vacation for the whole week

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: Tzviya and BillM are on holiday, so there’s been no progress on the RFP or the funding

Bill Kasdorf: do we have a pricing structure, tiered pricing?

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: we haven’t nailed this down yet

Bill Kasdorf: RFP is for developers?

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: yes
… one thing we could do on Tuesday is
… starting to get top five lists of things to fix in epubcheck

3. epub:type, general topic on extensions

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: we could get that both from reading systems and from publishers/content creators
… Tzviya and I have put in some requirements
… one of them has escalated
… we have wanted to indicate that an image is historical
… this could be useful for a11y
… if you have limited sight, it could be useful to know something is blurry
… and now one RS wants reading-system-specific tagging
… and we don’t want that
… this is an opportunity for a lovely trade
… I convinced Amazon yesterday to respect aria-roles and epub:type
… but I don’t have something for that

Garth Conboy: epub:type=”blurry”

Luc Audrain: there are discussions about role being only for a11y, and epub:type is for semantic structure
… it may be that Ace in the future checks that the role for image is on image tag
… you can’t put cover role on section because it overrides the native sectioning role
… things are complicated
… we need structural semantics for publishing
… a11y rules are different

Bill Kasdorf: I was going to bring up a related question
… people are saying because @role is for a11y
… nobody uses epub:type; it has no results in implementations
… so they’re saying don’t use epub:type

Garth Conboy: footnotes are done with epub:type
… apple and google do that

Ivan Herman: epub:type cannot work with HTML5 html serialization
… we will have to find a long-term solution
… is there something on the F2F agenda?
… whatever we do there, I don’t think the current group is chartered for that
… we need changes to HTML, a new attribute with standard values
… . we either need to have @role available for semantics, or a new attribute
… but epub:type can’t outlive EPUB 3

Luc Audrain: We do need a way to preserve semantics

Ivan Herman: this community needs to make the point
… there is a strong need for a community to extend HTML
… there are tools, techniques, ways
… it’s fuzzy what’s valid and what isn’t
… that whole issue of extending HTML is of interest to many communities
… if the BG worked on this, or something…
… this has been on my mind for a long time
… this community needs structural information that’s not tied to ARIA
… the browser manufacturers, we can’t expect them to solve all the miseries of the world
… so some decentralization is needed

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: I need something short-term
… so we may need something retailer-specific

Ivan Herman: in parallel to that, if the BG came up with clear and strong business needs
… that were well-documented, that would help a lot
… “we need it” is not good enough

Bill Kasdorf: scholarly publishing has universal vocabs, but there’s a giant case for it

Ivan Herman: if the BG could come up with a document with the business cases on what is needed in how
… that could be a starting point

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: we’ll try to get some buy-in on Tuesday

Luc Audrain: yes, this is on the F2F agenda

Ivan Herman: we won’t be in position to do too much in the working group

Bill Kasdorf: and there won’t be any scholars there due to SSP

Ivan Herman: Wiley will be there

Dave Cramer: if we brought this up in WICG, they’d just tell us to use something, and see if it gets traction

Ivan Herman: yes, but we do need the arguments too
… it has to be well documented

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: the other thing I want to raise
… what is the shortlist of epub:type and aria role values we expect reading systems to support

George Kerscher: should we also be talking about how that support is manifested?

Dave Cramer: yes

Luc Audrain: what do you mean?

George Kerscher: if you have semantics that this is a glossary
… you go to the back of the book you have a heading “glossary”. what does the reading system do?

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: there’s no consistency

Bill Kasdorf: the behaviour can be controlled by HTML markup

George Kerscher: if I want a hot key to go to the glossary, you want to use the semantics to take you to the glossary

Bill Kasdorf: you want to go to a term

George Kerscher: sometimes I want to just go to the glossary itself

Ivan Herman: let’s not solve the issue now

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: discussing this at a business level helps
… and it helps focus the requirements-gathering so it is more tangible
… it would be easier if we knew what people want to make things more consistent
… sounds like we have a good agenda

Luc Audrain: any other business?

Garth Conboy: complicated calendar stuff

Ivan Herman: stupid computers are stupid :)