DPUB IG Telco, 2015-03-23: CSS fragment draft review, Identifiers, latinreq update

See the minutes online for a more detailed record of the discussions.

Review on CSS Fragments

The Interest Group was asked to review the CSS Fragmentation Module Level 3 Draft, published in January. The overall view of the specification is that it will provide, when finalized, will take care of a lot of problems on how to handle page-break, column-break, fragment-break, etc., combined with various situations like float.

There were also a number of areas that were identified as practical problems and that are may not have been (yet) addressed (or addressed adequately) by the draft. One notable area is with placed elements like images, video, or movable blocks: how to you handle those (e.g., by possibly reducing their size a bit) to still keep the page breaks acceptable, etc. In general, dynamic reflow when handling pagination is not (yet) addressed.

The reviewers in the DPUB IG have collected their detailed comments in one or several mails that have been posted to the discussion mailing list of the CSS WG; the detailed discussions will be continued there.

Identifiers

The IG has set up a new task force, on Identifiers whose goal is to consider the technical challenges, in relations to EPUB-WEB, on defining identifiers. Some introductory materials has been prepared, and has been added to the Wiki page, with some background materials and a rough proposed strategy.

The discussion concentrated on what the detailed goals of the Task Force will be. The feeling was that the group should, primarily, formulate what kinds of requirements the Publishing Community in general, and EPUB-WEB in particular, would have v.a.v. identifiers.

When considering packages, there are two different aspects: how to get to a specific content file within a package, and then how to get to a final content within the content. The latter should reuse, whenever possible, existing media fragment definitions, e.g., as registered by an xpointer scheme and/or by IETF; the former requires further work (and is exemplified today by EPUB’s CFI or the Fragment specification of the Web Packaging Draft). However, it should be emphasized that, on long term, if one creates a URI, that should look the same no matter what the publication is (archive or online) which is an important thing to remember moving forward.

The discussion will continue on the mailing list…

Latinreq

The status of Latinreq (a document trying to document how page layout should be done in Western languages): it is considered to be a living document, with new issues and aspects added to it. Contribution on additional features to be added are very welcome.

During the meeting additional feature requests were mentioned: e.g., how to publish fitting monolithic content into a fixed-size page, placing captions relative to images, handling tables (e.g., diagonal headers for tables)

Miscellaneous

The group also handled administrative issues like open action items and plans for upcoming face-to-face meetings.