DPUB IG Telco, 2015-06-01: F2F Recap, Charter Recap, Packaging Requirements

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

F2F Recap

Tzviya gave a summary of the F2F (held in NYC, on the 26th of May); see the separate summary of the F2F blog for further details. We also thanked the IDPF Board and Diane Kennedy (IDEAliance) for attending and contributing to the meeting.

Charter recap

Ivan Herman also gave an overview of the new charter discussion, as well as a separate discussion held with the IG chairs later in the week. The discussion of the week have been summarized in a series of github issues. Some of the issues worth mentioning are

• make it clear that the new IG is a continuation of the old one, i.e., any work that has already been started is taken over
• the formulation around EPUB should avoid any possible misunderstandings on the mutual role and position of EPUB and the WEB (as such a tiny change in naming has been adopted, namely to refer to EPUB+WEB instead of EPUB-WEB)
• the list of issues in the charter should be more focussed
• a number of stylistic issues

Ivan Herman plans to make a new version of the charter this week. The IG is encouraged to contribute in terms of comments and issues.

Packaging functional requirements

Tzviya Siegman has prepared a preliminary list that was discussed and updated. Some of the issues that were discussed were:

Size limits on packages?

This is an issue that came up during the F2F; current EPUB spec says that ZIP 64 should be used, it is unclear what the limits should be in future. It was agreed that it is not possible to put an explicit limit, instead something like "be sensible":-)

This issue is also related to the question of video or audio sizes and whether there should be a requirements on those. This is related to the requirement of streamability of the content.

Role of packaging and identification

Prior to the meeting Ivan Herman started a discussion thread on identification and packages, i.e., on what a 'canonical' URI should be for a part within a package. This raised the issue whether packaging is needed in the first place, and what it means to separate the notion of a document on the Web from the Web as a whole. These should be clarified as part of the requirements.

The more or less agreement is that some sort of a packaging format is necessary to transfer a publication among people, but it may also be necessary to have the notion of some sort of a 'virtual' packaging on the Web to hold a publication (e.g., have a clear URI for it). This conceptual unity is at the heart of EPUB+WEB. But the issue of what the URI is for a part remains, and it is not yet clear how to solve it.

Dave Cramer also noted that there is a discussion on the Web Performance mailing list on packaging, something to consider. (See Dave's subsequent email on this.)