Digital Publishing Interest Group call minutes, 2013-11-25


Regrets: Bert Bos, Jean Kaplansky, George Walkley, Sharad Garg, Thierry Michel, Brady Duga, Richard Schwerdtfeger, Gerardo Capiel, Frederic HirschPresent: Tzviya Siegman, Dave Cramer, Vladimir Levantovsky, Ivan Herman, Markus Gylling, Rob Sanderson, Dmitry Shkolnik, Alan Stearns, Peter Linss, Suzanne Taylor
Chair: Markus
Scribe: Rob
(Due to a disc error at MIT the usual minute formatting software could not be run)

Markus: Introductions for new members. We have two new -- Dmitry and Alan
... A few words about who you are please.
Dmitry:  Lead develper at Adobe. From Adobe digital publishing and adobe server. Main interests are pagination and drm
Alan:  Alan Stearns from Adobe. WOrk on web engine team, contribute specs and code to CSS. Layout pagination and typography.
Markus:  The purpose of today's call was to summarize where we are at this point in the various tracks. Ivan has suggested we consolidate subgroups in the wiki
... So others can know what we are and are not doing.  Also had intent to summarize highlights of TPAC. Thinking that given the regrets we should postpone that.
... What do people think? Try to keep the call shorter and save TPAC for later
... Agenda topics about metadata.  Been talking about metadata on the calls, and the question is what is there really to do. What does the OWP lack?
... Bill Kasdorf, I and Ivan talked about it with Madi and we're thinking that there is room for an effort around metadata
... Bill, how about you summarize what you see as the scope and intent of the group?
Bill: I think that what I would recommend is the issue of MD and vocabularies is very complex, lots of stakeholders, lots of organizations.
... We do not want to position what we're doing as being in competition.  Want to focus on enabling to do their work in a way to integrate with OWP
... Focus is on the enabling technologies, not the specific vocabularies.
... Came down to agenda point -- what do we need to do in OWP to help publishers with all aspects of their work.
... Madi was suggesting that we begin with a focus on subject metadata.  Universally needed and high priority for publishers
... While true, if OWP to be used throughout, that's only one type of metadata. Lots of others -- structure, technical, administrative, etc.
... Need to know what publishers need from OWP to do those things.  Mechanism may already be available, just not understood or widely used
... Need to recruit a task force with representation from library community, commercial publishers, etc. Convene a group to see what makes sense
Ivan:  Slightly different view.  The kind of work you describe requires very different set of expertise and background and coming from other communities
... real work to be done should be done in a really different group
... should not be on Markus to lead, I would set up eventually a separate group in the same activity and try to recruit people to that separately
Calls woudl be very strange as the two groups would not understand the other
... We should clearly describe and document what the publishing community thinks can and should be done in W3C
... Whether it should be W3C at all. And to have a clear idea about it -- write a charter for a separate group.
Markus:  Separate group is different from subgroup/task force
Ivan: Yes. Task force to clarify what and where. The requirements of the publishing community
... but once this is done to separate what is not to be done here
don't want to repeat the work of editeur or schema.org
... Don't have a clear view on what has to be done.  WHen that is decided, seems healthier to make it a separate group, otherwise afraid it would be difficult to manage
Markus:  Is it okay for this IG to start with listing problems?
Bill: And Use cases?
Ivan:  Yes. Look at use cases and find problems to be solved.
Markus:  This will be Bill's first assignment
... Things that publishers want to be able to do in OWP but can't
Markus:  May also tie into some of the topics that Tzviya has been working on.  WOrking on adaption as well.
Tzivya:  Bill and I have had conversations about that also
Markus:  Is there anything else we need to do?
Ivan:  At this moment the question is whether Bill has a clear idea of where to go
Bill: FIrst step would be to invite members to participate, see who responds, see where the gaps are
(Rob will participate from library background)
Bill: COnvene the group and collectively see how to move forwards. Calls, or just emails.
... Need to make initial statement about the scope/point of the group. If that makes sense
Ivan: Sounds good to me
Markus: Let's start there
Ivan: Practical issue, W3C telco is at your disposal at any time
... Can request separate code that you're welcome to use. Can set up ad-hoc calls.
Markus:  Thank you Bill for taking this on
... Ivan and I will be working to try and bring a sense of organization to the various subgroups
... first step is to consolidate info
... on the wiki. You see the ones listed, and now another one, that we have at this point
... A new activity from TPAC, but not sure how to do it yet, is DOM pagination
... pretty well minuted segment of TPAC where we discuss the issues and the idea is Brady will be the lead to describe what is needed for browsers
... what support in the DOM, including events and so on.  One which hasn't kicked off yet, is bridging offline/online topic
... very broad and interesting, how today's distribution of responsibility between on/offline publishing
... eg online native or epub, how that can be bridged
... today in EPUB you are completely disconnected from online.  Two different publications/flows to achieve having both, which creates lots of issues
... artifact of historical events and doesn't have to be that way
... question is how to make portable document publishing, eg in EPUB, integrated with online native
... My suggestion is that we run through this and what you need help/input
... More time on DOM pagination as we have Alan and Dmitry here.
... Accessibility ... Suzanne:
Suzanne: Anxious to hear about TPAC.
... Will have a number of new use cases to add.
Markus:  Accessibility summary -- meetings with PF and SVG.  Gerard Capiel from Benetech had meeting and made a lot of progress
... Asked to review user accessbility guidelines from dpub point of view. Should distribute within task force.
... ETS has joined the IG and interested in describing improved ARIA semantics for assessments
... Next thing is to ensure ETS is up and going to provide use cases
... Anything else?
Ivan:  Annotation of MathML but Gerado is preparing a blog to go on DPUB blog.
Markus:  Two tracks for use cases to get up and running.  Tzviya...
Tzviya:  Added some more use cases, interesting conversations at TPAC.  Some come from ibooks spec for adapting epub
... Eg audio integration
... PRISM vocab, more to do with refining classes and HTML to be easier to style, process, not necessarily defining behaviour
... certainly giving clearly info about what particuar tag is
... might be part of metadata, but some examples have been incorporated to shortcut the need for scripting
... if anyone has additional examples, would love to see them
Markus:  Great.  What Tzviya is doing is collecting wide range of examples of extensions of HTML done in publishing
... to do something with out resorting to scripts
... collection of prior art will help us understand the problem of extensions and how this needs to be done better
... interesting discussion with RObin Berjon of HTML5 about following the lead of ITS for 2.0 where they reserve attributes beginning with prefix plus hyphen
... one of the problems in epub is the small extensions are namespaced, likely to be a future where we use non XML serialization
... or serialization agnostic.  Need to look at optimal mechanism going forwards
Tzviya: Advantage of ITS is that it validates
Markus:  Bona Fide extension, not needing validator to be written
Ivan:  One more thing was that someone has to produce a clearly defined document listing exactly the attributes we want to use and possible values
... HTML5 group would accept it if it's well documents
Markus:  I would suggest we wait a bit, especially until Tziviya's work is more complete.  Premature -- can make a replica of EPUB type, but not the right solution. Need more data on what community is doing
Tzviya: Agree, all groups wondering about scope
... PRISM used in magazines ... is that something we shoudl be considering
Markus:  Magazine content adaption ... there's even more new things... Open EST ... loads of things in there as well
... How about we say no for now, magazines not out of scope, but keep self confined to book space for now, we can reach some milestone
Ivan:  We did the same when discussed scope for latin-rec so we have restriction for first version and then in a year we might move on
... reasonable to restrict scope first
Bill:  I would like to see what comes out as a general purpose recommendation that could work just as well for other kinds of publications
... should avoid being book centric
... Use books as a means for surfacing issues, but features should be agnostic as to type
(lots of +1s)
Markus:  Do you need something from us now?
Tzviya:  Helpful for others to contribute examples
Either spec or behind the scenes
Markus: DO have a ??? rep on the list.  One thing would be to ask on the list.
Also on epub WG list too
... Latin Rec... Dave.
Dave:  Just got back from Asia on Thursday so first full day of work ... Hasn't been any movement
other than to implement name/scope change
... Been in contact with Ben and he's about 1/2 available to help
Markus:  As we have alan and dmitry here, do yoau have a suggestion for how to bring in adobe?
Dave: I think that they'll be more critical on translating what we document here into CSS language and identifying gaps
... how much what we want to do can be done already
Markus: If we look at feature sets, are features like advanced adaptive layout in scope or not?
Dave:  I think these are techniques for achieving certain designs.  Designs are in scope
... We have things like quotes and slopes on the page, and how to assign positions, etc.
... All things we can and will describe. Inputs for decisions AAL may be making
... Descriptive about what design and layout features we consider important not how we achive them
Markus: What I'm after is use cases from that part of the DPUB industry that are on the cutting edge
Dave:  Another thing would like to get contributions in that area from adobe or anyone else
Markus:  Suggesting latin rec as the host for that
Dave: I guess I am
... trying to be broad in collecting for design principles
Makus: Question is for Alan and Dmitry if you'd be in position to work with Dave to describe desired features and document as use cases.
Alan:  Yes definitely.  Makes sense to divide things into three stages. 1 - traditional things to achieve in design. 2 - adaptive portion. how some use cases work work with unfixed page size
... what I want to express in adaptive layout.  Then those wil inform what layout tech is produced
... latin rec should have those use cases, shouldn't be getting into tech details.
Dave:  I like the idea of scribing the adaptive layer on top of the existing design layer
Markus: Sounds great
... if latin rec can be structured that way sounds excellent
Markus: Anything else we need to do, or ready to get moving?
Alan: Yes
Markus: Anything else?  Dave: Not at the moment
Markus: describing use cases and features not solutions, resolved to separate solutions using CSS into separate doc. Latin rec should be free from making such statements
... DOM pagination.  Brady is not here, suggest we wait
... Input from CSS will be welcome.
... he will document use cases and gaps
... Sharad and Jean are not here. Anything about security or MATHML?
... for those who haven't read the minutes of TPAC resolved to keep DRM out of scope
... now more security and privacy centric
... Rob ...
annotations:
rob; put up another few use cases, and revised existing cases a bit
talking to ivan about moving from CG to WG
rob: if you have annotation use cases, send email or write on wiki
Markus:  incongruence between CG and here
rob: overlap is pretty high, some out of scope things in CG such as structures above single annotations have proven to be needed in DPUB
rob: in early stages of CG had a lot of academics we had a lot of complex use cases
markus:  parallel effort in IDPF working on adapting open annotation to use in current EPUB 2 and 3 contexts
... of course overlap between here and there
... Ivan ... to start with consolidation, what else can we do today
Ivan: I will come up with an overview table on the wiki for the various groups.  At some point each group will organize itself and scope of work
... eventually some docs will be produced
... Good to ahve one place to find all of that
... also a place where outsiders can look at what is going on. While doing that table some gaps will appear
... I will start tomorrow
markus:  Any other questions or comments?
Tzviya: Looking at main page... according to timeline we're supposed to have a draft of issues for other groups in january
Ivan:  WOuld be good but only early draft.  To be fair we have done a lot of that
... think presnese at TPAC was good. Had joint meetings with CSS and SVG.  A bunch of technical issues already came up
... first draft in a more systematic way would be good
.. If not January then February or so
Markus:  Clear that we're reaching out to existing efforts.  Some will be earlier than others
... eg Rob's collection is the most expansive and one we can bless and submit to CG earlier than others
... smilarly accessibility for SVG is moving.  One of the discoveries is that these things will all move at different paces
... so we should be able to deliver partial use case collections in january, but a subset of the efforts
Markus:  If there's nothing else then we're done for today