DPUB IG Telco, 2015-03-30: Structural Semantics, Packaging Use Cases

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

DPUB-ARIA a.k.a. Structural Semantics update

For background of this work (quoting from the abstract of the document):

Accessibility of web content requires semantic information about widgets, structures, and behaviors, in order to allow assistive technologies to convey appropriate information to persons with disabilities. This specification defines a WAI-ARIA module encompassing an ontology of roles, states, and properties specific to the digital publishing industry. These semantics are designed to allow an author to convey digital book user interface behaviors and structural information to assistive technologies and to enable semantic navigation, styling, and interactive features used by digital book readers. It is expected this will complement HTML5.

The ARIA DPUB Module has undergone significant changes, and the first public Working Draft (published by the W3C PF WG) is planned to be published mid-April. Comments, issues are very welcome, e.g., through emails or github issues.

The big change, compared to previous versions, is that the definitions of terms have been tightened up significantly. They used to be very book-centric, but they are now more general, meaning that the same terms can be used more broadly on the Web. Lots of details had to be handled (and there is still work to do) to align with terms used elsewhere in ARIA. The superclass roles, related aria attributes, examples for all terms, etc., have all been added.

Subsequent discussions concentrated mostly on how to make this document more understandable to Digital Publishing experts who are not familiar with ARIA. It has been agreed that more examples should be added using the aria attributes, too, that a few words should be added on how this work relates to the current practice of epub:type, the work happening within the EDUPUB initiative, etc.

Packaging use cases

A first batch of packaging use cases has been published on the group's Wiki pages.

These cases don't address the basics but they are packaging requirements required for a publishing workflow. Some examples:

• Publishing a journal with a dataset
• Annotations (which borders on having an annotations requirement) and how peer-review will factor into the publication itself.
• Shared resources—such as CSS files—the publication should be able to tap into those shared-resources and make the streamed download process.
• If a package contains 12 abstracts, the user should be able to access just the abstracts.
• In downloading a package, it would be great if the user/agent would recognize what is new content vs. existing content, which makes offline reading possible.

Some other issues and possible directions were also discussed at the call (necessity—or not—to add DRM related features, finding metadata, etc.) The goal is to develop these and other use cases and provide these as input for the ongoing Web Packaging Work at W3C (which will have an influence on EPUB-WEB).

Administrativia

Due to Eastern Monday, which is a holiday in most of Europe, there will be no meeting on the 6th of April.