WorkAreas

The main focus of the discussion until now has been around the ePub3 specification and its usage. A number of issues were raised on the present day practice of digital publishing, areas where a cooperation with W3C might be helpful for the future:

• Interoperability issues around ePub3 . Interoperability is weakened today by format forks (e.g., Apple's iBook), issues created by scripting, etc. As a result, publishers have to test against many different readers, possibly publishing different variants, etc. Some areas where W3C may bring in its expertise, contacts with other groups, possibly technical work:
  • thorough conformance specification
  • testing methodologies, test suites to improve interoperability
  • considering widget specification again as a possible mean to improve interoperability of scripting
  • component model work for local extensions
  • adapting the experiences in the mobile web practices work to ePub authoring
  • (if W3C is successful in getting ahead in these) DRM and standard media formatting issues
    • There is a good link to the ODRL Community Group that has developed a Policy (i.e. rights) language that can be used here
• Outreach work. Outreach around ePub would be greatly helped by W3C's presence and help. This is badly needed; at the moment, publishers, institutions (including governmental institutions), etc., are often led by 3rd parties in choosing their formats, leading to proprietary dialects coming to the fore.
• Metadata: ePub has the necessary hooks to add metadata, but clearer structures and profiles to connect these to terminologies used, for example, by the library world may help in handling e-books by libraries, in long term preservation of e-books, etc.
• ISO stamp on ePub. Some may be interested doing that, and W3C's PAS status within ISO might be helpful

It is also important to realize that W3C has a lot to gain for its own, core work in cooperating with ePub; indeed the experiences in that community may be important inputs to HTML.next. Examples are table of content, glossaries, or indexes, and experiences in the workflow of major publishing institutions.