Meeting Record

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Zakim IRC Bot: ok, trackbot; I see DPUB_DPUBIG()11:00AM scheduled to start in 56 minutes ←

Tzviya Siegman: https://mit.webex.com/mit/j.php?MTID=mbe4d8f8ddff93dc10bf9114c7db1a578 ←

Tzviya Siegman: sorry, https://mit.webex.com/mit/j.php?MTID=m09c698f2da7d2f28d301b85cf2d76b08 ←

...: "We did a recap of the face-to-face and talked about functional requirements for Packaging. Minutes approved" ←

Tzviya Siegman: https://www.w3.org/dpub/IG/wiki/Functional_Requirements_for_Pagination ←

...: "Next item: Dave has put together a draft of the functional requirements for packaging. Based on Latin-req and pagination." ←

Dave Cramer: "Calling it a draft is a bit much, but it's a start. I tried to broadly categorize things so we had a list without 50 members on it. Basics: control margins, orientation, page display. How we can do rendering, pages, and some typography issues. I know even some very large corporations that should be members are interested in these sorts of enhancements for their ebooks. A section on ←

interacting with pages - copy/pasting, brady's requirements. I'm sure there are things that are missing. I would love other people's input. How much detail do we need? Relationship with Project Houdini..." ←

...: "There are like 10 links in the chain - requirements, the new APIs that browsers would have to expose... I'm technically unqualified to get the whole way there. " ←

Tzviya Siegman: "The point of the document is to get our ideas down, so that we can have that conversation. So we can sit down with project Houdini and say: 'these are our requirements, please tell us what's missing." ←

Tzviya Siegman: "We need to know what is missing - so what about pagination would you like to see?" ←

Scribe problem: the name 'Alan' is ambiguous. It could be any of: Alan Tam Alan Stearns . Either change the name used or insert a 'PRESENT: ...' line to restrict the active names.

Unknown Alan: "One thing I don't see on the list (not sure it should be there) is some greater control over line-breaks for a particular representation. We have pagination requirements about fitting things on a particular page. Dave - you use HTML as part of your workflow - and you'" ←

..: "You're printing to a particular medium/width, do you have the ability to set linebreaks, or is that not something we should be worrying about." ←

Scribe problem: the name 'Alan' is ambiguous. It could be any of: Alan Tam Alan Stearns . Either change the name used or insert a 'PRESENT: ...' line to restrict the active names.

Unknown Alan: "Until we have everything automated, we will need greater control over how things are rendered." ←

Dave Cramer: "I'd love input on what those features might be to control. Such as if you're in indesign and trying to set a line-break. your paragraph will continue to wrap apropriately." ←

Markus Gylling: "One thing I don't see as well is the notion of page set layouts - in other words, you start with a viewport with 1, 2, ... N pages. how many do you want to show? What is the visual and logical flow? Latin-req talks about facing page alignment and adjustment, but that is just stitching between things that are together." ←

Tzviya Siegman: "We can call it REGION not just pages, so it covers things like comic books, and still covers pages." ←

Dave Cramer: "I'm worried things getting confusing if we get too generic. Especially since regions can be non-rectangular and have more complications." ←

Tzviya Siegman: "it could be a separate item. We could talk about the regions being non-rectangular." ←

Dave Cramer: "All sorts of non-rectangular things will be on the pages. Are we worrying about non-rectangular pages? We can make note of that, but I think given right now that our viewports and our pages are rectangular..." ←

Unknown Luke: "I was wondering what we've been doing with typesetting and templates. A title page might be different from following pages. " ←

Unknown Luke: "My 2nd remark is typically digital. We have this case when we can make things appear in popups. It introduces a 3rd dimension. This introduces areas that appear above the page. Is it something we should consider especially if we'd like to manage the space where these popups could appear?" ←

Dave Cramer: "On the 2nd part, other parts of CSS. Other parts of CSS support layering, stacking, the index. That sort of content would need to be fragmented. As far as describing the types of content/effects with those kinds of books. It feels like something for our 22nd century counterparts to work on." ←

Dave Cramer: "As far as the earlier note on templates. There are some rudamentary ways that you can note in a given way what context the page has been rendered. It is not as complex as some of the proposed ways we want to use it." ←

Ivan Herman: "My questions are more general: Should I understand it that the first few sections are actually requirements we would like to see as CSS properties - new or existing. Whereas the 2nd part is the runtime DOM access side of it. Or is this whole thing a giant Javascript with all the necessary information." ←

Dave Cramer: "I was broadly thinking of it in the way you mentioned. How that is achieved in the near future is probably through custom CSS properties if houdini brings us fruit." ←

Dave Cramer: "I'm also a little wary of putting that sort of info - that it's about implementation rather than..." ←

Ivan Herman: "We wouldn't like the whole of the pagination issue to be a giant javascript - aside from what CSS does in the traditional way - so it's a general requirement. As much as it is humanly possible..." ←

Dave Cramer: "Given that there needs to be end-user control for some of these issues. Such as reading systems letting users pick font sizes. At least one potential use for that is a "user stylesheet"." ←

Ivan Herman: "Even our core constiuency. Editors and publishers - we do not want to force them to become publishers." ←

Unknown Nick: the Apple watch shows that there is investment in non-rectangular displays [ Scribe Assist by Unknown Ralph ] ←

Tzviya Siegman: we need to think about whether that is a Digital Publishing concern [ Scribe Assist by Unknown Ralph ] ←

Unknown Nick: right; we shouldn't reinvent the wheel but let's not assume the world is rectangular [ Scribe Assist by Unknown Ralph ] ←

Tzviya Siegman: that's why I mention "regions" generally [ Scribe Assist by Unknown Ralph ] ←

Dave Cramer: "Back to the issue of non-rectangular display - for the most part my apple watch IS a rectangle. If we do even 1/2 of what's on this list, it's an accomplishment. I'm worried about putting efforts into things like non-rectangular when there are foundational items." ←

Unknown Andrew: "I wanted to bring up Javascript VS CSS. I don't think we know where all of this is going to live. It'd be great for CSS to solve all the problems, but I don't think that's necessarily likely. Alot of pagination will happen in custom javascript. What Houdini is doing is bringing us the ability to do this. Not sure how much is CSS vs JS, but the medium-term will be heavily JS." ←

Unknown Andrew: "As a RS implementer, we sometimes get CSS that is handled by JS. At the end of the day, it's JS, even if the publishers aren't writing it." ←

Ivan Herman: "This is a set of requirements. it would be important from our point of view - to express that we'd like to be as far away from Javascript as humanly possible. The CSS working group may not completely fulfill it, but there should be a clear case that 'this is the way it is, but we don't like it." ←

Unknown Andrew: "If you don't understand that you'll be needing Javascript to do this, then you'll design the spec for CSS, which puts Javascript implementation at a benefit." ←

Brady Duga: "What i'd like is a tag <book> that lets me miraculously have an ebook reader for my content, but that won't happen, but at least for now, having declarations is a good start. What I really need is enough CSS/JS to allow me to implement this." ←

Bill Kasdorf: a reminder that there are many types of publications that aren't <book>s ←

Tzviya Siegman: "So - this boils down to 'how do we define a package' It would be a very good to put this down in the packaging spec." ←

Tzviya Siegman: "Fill free to fill in additional information on this spec, then lets get in touch with Houdini people, and wave our magical wands. Vini Vidi VICI!" ←

...: "Next item - discussion - Ivan and I discussing whether scholarly publishing is properly addressed in our use-cases. " ←

...: "Many of us are involved in scholarly publishing, which is more about articles and journals (which are collections of articles). There are not focuses on a 'book' or retail channels, most are about publishing through peer-review journals and peer-review. We're not working with Kindles, apples, etc of the world. We're talking about wiley, elsiver, etc." ←

Bill Kasdorf: "One thing that makes this more urgent is that this content - most scholarly journal content is online." ←

Tzviya Siegman: "A majority of it is online as PDFs. Many have done away with print completely." ←

Bill Kasdorf: "I think we want schoarly publishing to say: "Lets use dpub instead of PDF."" ←

...: "The fact that we view scholarly publishing as multi-column isn't really part of what it means to be a journal. I don't see it as being that different from any other pagination issue we have. Our use-cases already addresses multi-column." ←

Tzviya Siegman: "I think we'll find that a lot of our use-cases cover this already." ←

Ivan Herman: "There is a category that is closer to books, but part of scholarly publishing. Those are conference proceedings. Depends on the area. Conferences and workshops, proceedings of some of the big conferences have the same weight as scholarly journals. They are collections of journals, but often published. Not sure I agree with that the issue with columns isn't necessarily about saving ←

paper. For usability, having shorter lines, the document is more readable and better to understand the content. On the side, we have discussions on whether we would make new formats for recommendations for the future. Whether the size of the lines on a W3C recommendation should be a certain size. The 2-column is a disaster if you have to make reviews." ←

..: "There is one aspect that is very important for Scholarly publishing. More and more scholarly means scientific data. So our package needs to include scientific data - such as fragment identifier, which needs to accomodate the many types of data. There may be a limit where the data is just dumped on the web, and other times where it is part of the publication. When working on astronomy, ←

...: "You get data with different interactive ways of working with the data. There are many online publications that have this feature. Epub is very defensive when it comes to Javascript. I may be imagining that we have to interact with Data in different ways means that the kind of javascripts that we have to allow will be difficult to control." ←

Bill Kasdorf: "My comment is that the issue of double-columns and "shorter lines" do not need to be related to columns themselves. " ←

Tzviya Siegman: "If anyone has more information, please add to the use cases" ←

Tzviya Siegman: "Tables are an issue - it's difficult to present tables on small (or even large) screens. Whether they should be tables,... We can lecture, but some people will do tables anyway." ←

Tzviya Siegman: it would be helpful if somone could address the relationship between DPUB & annotation with respect to scholarly ←

Ivan Herman: "I'm just raising one more thing - Not sure if it effects anythign up to now - when scholarly articles are published, and are stable, then they are usually - and very often - they are looked up on various search engines & crawlers because they want to have cross references managed. See if the author has references to their publications. Alot of problems that exist in traditional book ←

publishers. My impression is that the community is more active than traditional book publishers. In the case of a scientific publication, the fact that data is made avaialble in search engines seems more often. It's a general point. The other question I have is that the whole workflow for generating the publications, in many respects, is very different. Not sure how it effects the things ←

we've discussed. They seem to have their own XML specification for their items. The items are bound to that type of XML flow." ←

Heather Flanagan: and soon-ish, STS, which is a tag suite for standards based on JATS ←

...: "I don't know whether there are actually anythign done to combine that flow with epub3 today - or any kind of epub-like package. Does that community ignore that whole aspect? that is important for us to know." ←

Tzviya Siegman: "Each company does it their own way - as there is a requirement to deliver the papers. It would be good to type up the requiremetns for things like peer review. One thing we see more in scholarly publishing is the use of semantic web - embedded triple set is much more common in scholarly publishing. Not necessarily something we need to address, but something we have discussed when ←

Bill Kasdorf: "An observation - there's a 'BITS' that has - to some extent - removed tables in HTML. It used to accomodate tex, but now it supports MathML. My question is - do we have computable math? Run a calculation on a dataset." ←

Tzviya Siegman: "Computational MathML is what you're referring to I believe." ←

Markus Gylling: "What's interesting for me, How can we get closer to that community - which seems to be very disjoined from traditional book publishing. We have to ensure both these communities are on board. And so I am not absolutely sure how to do it, but it's necessary." ←

Scribe problem: the name 'Tim' is ambiguous. It could be any of: Tim Clark Timothy Cole . Either change the name used or insert a 'PRESENT: ...' line to restrict the active names.

Unknown Tim: "I also wanted to say that - the textbook community is between the scholarly publishing and traditional publishing. " ←

Tzviya Siegman: "If you have use-cases, please add them. What seems to be happening with scholarly publishing is that each organization is doing it their own way." ←

Markus Gylling: "EPUB is not part of the scholarly world today. Is it easy to answer the question Why?" ←

Tzviya Siegman: "I can tell you why epub isn't - epub for scholarly - the PDF is comfortable. At the same time, publishers are still publishing PDFs, they are going ahead with HTML. They have PDF and HTML, so there is a "why do we need epub" as far as a package for things like datasets, where does a large database that is a source-file for content fit?" ←

Markus Gylling: "If scholarly is going to HTML, then there is no fidelity issue anymore, no?" ←

Tzviya Siegman: "That is not as much of an issue for most of the scholarly publishing world." ←

Timothy Cole: +1 for Ivan - mathematicians being picky about how their math looks ←

Ivan Herman: "There is one area where pixel-perfect is important - mathematic. Where authors themselves - mainly mathematicians - are extremely picky on how these things look. That's why, in that part of the world, LaTex rules. The main issue is a perception rather than technical reason. There is a perception that 'epub is for books'. It isn't technical, just a social thing that has to be changed." ←

Ivan Herman: "As nick said, there is an aspect of education that is required. The idea of scholarly results and articles being online - this is something that the scholarly world has proceeded any book going online. In the 90s, what really happened was that the journals were printed, as a collection of articles, but authors did their best to have their papers on the web. The only tool back then was ←

PDF, and that's what stuck. Ever since there was a web, we had PDF for them to publish with. As a first step, journals became online. Subscriptions for jounrals are so high for printed journals, so the online journals because very useful. " ←

...: "It's only lately that you have primarily HTML journals. Just out of coincidence, there is a journal that I'm part of, and it happens to be in HTML. Then we get into the epub-web, and when I wanted an offline version, they could only give PDF, because they didn't know about epub or ebub-web. ←

Digital Publishing Interest Group Teleconference

Minutes of 08 June 2015

1. Scholarly publishing